Reliability Advocate

A Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE II) is sought after to lead the availability, latency, performance, and efficiency of our SaaS on Azure.

The ideal candidate will define and enforce reliability standards, lead high-impact projects, mentor engineers, and eliminate toil at scale. They will report directly to the Director of SRE.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define customer-centric SLIs/SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services, publish, review quarterly, and align teams to them.
• Run the error-budget policy with multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerts; clear runbooks and paging thresholds.
• Gate changes by budget status (freeze/relax rules) wired into CI/CD.
• Maintain SLO/EB dashboards (Azure Monitor, Grafana/Prometheus, App Insights). Run weekly SLO reviews with engineering/product.
• Drive roadmap tradeoffs when budgets are at risk; land reliability epics.
• Incidents without drama: Lead SEV1/SEV2, own comms, run blameless postmortems, and make corrective actions stick.
• Engineer reliability in: Multi-AZ/region patterns (active-active/DR), PDBs/Pod Topology Spread, HPA/VPA/KEDA, resilient rollout/rollback.
• AKS at scale: Harden clusters (network, identity, policy), optimize node/pod density, ingress (AGIC/Nginx); mesh optional.
• Observability that works: Metrics/traces/logs with Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry. Alert on symptoms, not noise.
• IaC & policy: Terraform/Bicep modules, GitOps (Flux/Argo), policy-as-code (Azure Policy/OPA Gatekeeper). No snowflakes.
• CI/CD reliability: Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions with canary/blue-green, progressive delivery, auto-rollback, Key Vault-backed secrets.
• Capacity & performance: Load testing, right-sizing, autoscaling; partner with FinOps to reduce spend without hurting SLOs.
• DR you can trust: Define RTO/RPO, test backups/restore, run game days/chaos drills, validate ASR and multi-region failover.
• Secure by default: Entra ID (Azure AD), managed identities, Key Vault rotation, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, shift-left checks in CI.
• Reduce toil: Automate recurring ops, build self-service runbooks/chatops, publish golden paths for product teams.
• Customer escalations: Be the technical owner on calls; communicate tradeoffs and recovery plans with authority.
• Document to scale: Architectures, runbooks, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs—kept current and discoverable.
• (If applicable) Streaming/ETL reliability: Apply SRE practices (SLOs, backpressure, idempotency, replay) to NiFi/Flink/Kafka/Redpanda data flows.

Requirements

• Bachelor's in CS/Engineering (or equivalent experience).
• 12+ years in production ops/platform/SRE, including 5+ years on Azure.
• PostgreSQL (must-have): Deep operational expertise incl. HA/DR, logical/physical replication, performance tuning (indexes/EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, pg_stat_statements), autovacuum strategy, partitioning, backup/restore testing, and connection pooling (pgBouncer). Prefer experience with Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server.
• Azure core: AKS (must-have); Front Door/App Gateway, API Management, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, Storage, Key Vault, Redis, Service Bus/Event Hubs.
• Observability: Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana; SLO design and error-budget operations.
• IaC/automation: Terraform and/or Bicep; PowerShell and Python; GitOps (Flux/Argo). Pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Proven incident leadership at scale, blameless postmortems, and SLO/error-budget governance with change gating.
• Mentorship and crisp written/verbal communication.

Nice to Have

• Apache NiFi, Apache Flink, Apache Kafka or Redpanda (self-managed on AKS or managed equivalents); schema management, exactly-once semantics, backpressure, dead-letter/replay patterns.
• Azure Solutions Architect Expert, CKA/CKAD.
• ITSM (ServiceNow), on-call tooling (PagerDuty/Opsgenie).
• Compliance/SecOps (SOC 2, ISO 27001), policy-as-code, workload identity.
• OpenTelemetry, eBPF tooling, or service mesh.
• Multi-tenant SaaS and cost optimization at scale.