Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Empower • KS Remote, KS

17h

About The Position

The Lead Site Reliability Engineer combines deep technical expertise with team leadership to drive reliability across Empower’s financial services platform. The role leads SREs in addressing complex operational challenges, establishes technical standards, and advises engineering leadership on infrastructure strategy and reliability initiatives. It provides technical leadership to a functional team without direct reporting responsibilities and partners across engineering, product, and security to align reliability with business needs.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7–10 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering or an equivalent field, with demonstrated technical leadership.
• Proven ability to lead technical teams and deliver complex projects.
• Expert-level AWS knowledge, including designing large-scale, multi-region architectures.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise, including advanced features, security, and production-scale operations.
• Mastery of Terraform infrastructure as code, including developing shared platforms and frameworks.
• Strong software engineering background with production experience in Python and/or Go.
• Extensive experience with Datadog and Splunk and implementing observability and monitoring solutions at scale.
• Deep understanding of CI/CD principles and experience implementing enterprise-grade pipelines.
• Proven experience leading major incidents and conducting effective postmortems.
• Strong communication skills, including explaining complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Experience mentoring engineers and developing technical capabilities within teams.
• Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S.; visa sponsorship, including CPT/OPT, is unavailable.

Nice To Haves

• Previous technical leadership experience in SRE or Operational Excellence, including Lead, Staff, or similar roles.
• Financial services industry experience and understanding of regulatory requirements.
• Expert knowledge of compliance frameworks, including SOC 2, PCI DSS, and FINRA.
• Professional-level AWS certifications.
• Kubernetes certifications, including CKA, CKAD, or CKS.
• Experience implementing SRE practices in organizations with 500 or more engineers.
• Background in chaos engineering, game days, and reliability testing.
• Open-source contributions with demonstrated community leadership.
• Experience implementing and managing service meshes.
• Experience speaking at conferences or publishing technical content.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-functional reliability initiatives across multiple teams, aligning technical efforts with business priorities.
• Define and evolve SRE best practices, tools, methodologies, and technical standards across the organization.
• Architect enterprise-scale, multi-region AWS infrastructure balancing reliability, cost, performance, and security.
• Establish Service Level Objectives and error budgets for critical services.
• Lead major incident response as incident commander and facilitate postmortems.
• Design and implement disaster recovery plans, chaos engineering practices, and systematic reliability testing.
• Develop reusable Terraform infrastructure modules and foundational infrastructure patterns.
• Architect and implement advanced Kubernetes patterns, including multi-tenancy, security policies, and advanced scheduling.
• Establish observability strategies and standards for metrics, logging, and tracing using Datadog and Splunk.
• Establish CI/CD standards and implement pipeline-as-code and progressive delivery practices.
• Drive FinOps initiatives to optimize cloud spending while maintaining reliability targets.
• Evaluate and introduce technologies and practices that improve operational efficiency and team effectiveness.
• Coordinate projects and operational initiatives for a functional SRE team without direct reporting responsibilities.
• Mentor SREs, conduct architecture and design reviews, and lead technical training sessions.
• Coordinate on-call schedules and implement improvements that reduce operational burden.
• Partner with Engineering Managers, Directors, Product teams, and Security teams to align reliability initiatives with business needs, implement zero-trust architecture and compliance controls, and balance feature delivery with reliability requirements.
• Influence architectural decisions and represent SRE in cross-functional planning and strategic initiatives.
• Promote SRE culture, practices, and continuous improvement across Empower.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• 401(k) plan with company matching contributions up to 6%, financial advisory services, potential company discretionary contribution, and a broad investment lineup.
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250 per year.
• Generous paid time off upon hire, including a paid time off program, ten paid company holidays, and three floating holidays each calendar year.
• Paid volunteer time: 16 hours per calendar year.
• Leave programs including paid parental leave, paid short- and long-term disability, and Family and Medical Leave (FMLA).
• Business Resource Groups open to all.
• Bonus program opportunity for non-sales positions.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior