Principal Site Reliability Engineer – Performance (A&D, Ultra HA/Exadata)

IFS•Ottawa, ON

14h

About The Position

The role of IFS Principal Site Reliability Engineer – Performance Engineering (Principal-SRE) exists within the Unified Support organization/division and serves as a technical and strategic leader for Site Reliability Engineering practices. By being part of the shift operation and broader SRE leadership, a Principal-SRE will drive 24x7x365 support excellence to IFS customers across the globe within the Aerospace & Defense (A&D) industry vertical while establishing and elevating SRE practices across the organization. This role sits within a dedicated performance engineering team supporting our Ultra High Availability (Ultra HA) on Exadata customers, where sustained database and application performance is a contractual commitment rather than a best-effort goal. As Principal SRE – Performance Engineering, you will be responsible for architecting and evolving the reliability frameworks, automation platforms, and operational strategies that underpin IFS's cloud-native products and infrastructure. This role involves setting technical direction, leading cross-functional teams, and partnering with R&D, Product, and Operations leadership to ensure that reliability is embedded at every level of service delivery. You will be an influential technical leader who drives organizational transformation through SRE principles, automation, and continuous improvement culture.

Requirements

University degree or equivalent professional qualification in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or similar discipline
Demonstrated expertise in modern ticket/service desk tooling (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, or equivalent)
ITIL, ISO 20000, or equivalent IT service delivery framework certification; or demonstrated mastery through practical application
Minimum 10+ years of progressive experience in cloud computing services, enterprise IT delivery, or site reliability engineering
Minimum 7-8 years in hands-on SRE, DevOps, or cloud operations roles with demonstrated impact on reliability, automation, and operational efficiency
Proven experience leading SRE teams and establishing SRE practices across organizations
Deep understanding of low-level concepts in cloud computing (resource management, networking, storage, security)
Demonstrated expertise in performance engineering including load testing, capacity planning, and system optimization
Experience supporting mission-critical, high-availability systems (preferably in Aerospace, Defense, Finance, or similar industries)
Hands-on experience operating or supporting Oracle Exadata platforms in production, ideally under Ultra High Availability or comparable premium-SLA commitments
Demonstrated experience in a dedicated performance engineering or performance-analysis function, owning latency, throughput, and capacity outcomes for named enterprise customers
Track record of designing and implementing large-scale automation platforms that reduce toil and improve MTTR
Demonstrated ability to establish and drive organizational change around reliability and operational excellence
Expert-level cloud service administration and operations (Azure, AWS, GCP)
Kubernetes/Docker architecture, operations, and troubleshooting at production scale
Network administration and troubleshooting (DNS, Load Balancing, VPN, firewall rules)
Enterprise storage solutions, block storage, and object storage optimization
Expert-level Oracle database administration and performance tuning
Expert-level Oracle database monitoring and diagnostics — AWR, ASH, ADDM, Statspack, SQL trace/TKPROF, and Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) — with the ability to move from symptom to root cause under production pressure
Advanced Oracle performance troubleshooting: wait-event and contention analysis, execution-plan regression, SQL and PL/SQL tuning, optimizer statistics, partitioning, and index strategy
Oracle high-availability architectures for Ultra HA workloads — RAC, Data Guard/Active Data Guard, ASM, and RMAN — including failover testing and recovery validation
Understanding of connection pooling, query optimization, and capacity planning for high-concurrency systems (3,000+ connections)
Experience with database backup, recovery, and disaster recovery strategies
Hands-on Oracle Exadata administration and performance management (Smart Scan, storage indexes, IORM, flash cache, cell-level diagnostics) — required for Ultra HA customer environments
Web server administration and troubleshooting (Wildfly, WebLogic, Nginx)
Application performance monitoring (APM) and optimization across the full request path — instrumentation, transaction tracing, and latency breakdown from web tier through middleware to the database
SSL/TLS certificate management and security best practices
Advanced proficiency in BASH, PowerShell, Python, or Go scripting
Infrastructure-as-Code expertise (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation)
CI/CD pipeline design and implementation
GitOps and declarative infrastructure practices
Design and implementation of enterprise-scale monitoring solutions
Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash/Beats, Kibana) for log aggregation, search, and analysis at scale; equivalent experience with Splunk or DataDog also considered
Grafana dashboard design and metrics visualization, including building performance dashboards that surface Oracle, infrastructure, and application metrics side by side (Prometheus or equivalent metrics backends)
OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation and distributed tracing, or equivalent APM tooling (Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic APM)
Ability to correlate database, infrastructure, and application telemetry into a single performance narrative, and to build proactive alerting on leading indicators of degradation rather than outright failure
Expert ability to debug complex, multi-tier applications
Deep understanding of application server internals and JVM diagnostics
Network packet analysis and protocol debugging
Linux system troubleshooting and performance analysis
Strategic thinking and ability to translate business objectives into technical strategies
Executive communication skills with ability to present complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
Team leadership and mentorship abilities with proven track record of developing technical talent
Change management and organizational influence skills
Problem-solving with ability to innovate new approaches to complex challenges
Decision-making under pressure with ability to weigh trade-offs between reliability, cost, and feature delivery
Emotional intelligence and ability to build trust across diverse, international teams
Proactive ownership of work items and willingness to challenge status quo for improvement
Self-learning and ability to stay current with rapidly evolving cloud technologies and SRE practices
Excellent communication in English (verbal and written) for cross-functional collaboration

Nice To Haves

Advanced cloud security best practices (Zero Trust, Identity & Access Management, encryption)
Extensive experience supporting large Aerospace & Defense customers and understanding of industry-specific compliance requirements
Performance engineering mastery including advanced load testing, capacity planning, and cost optimization strategies
Experience with Disaster Recovery (DR) planning and execution, including multi-region failover and RTO/RPO optimization
Expertise in cost optimization and FinOps practices for cloud infrastructure
Hands-on experience with event streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and asynchronous architecture patterns
API design and management experience
Machine Learning/AI applications for observability, anomaly detection, or predictive remediation
Certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator)
Oracle certifications (OCP Database Administrator, Exadata Database Machine Certified Implementation Specialist) or Elastic/Grafana certifications
Experience contributing to OpenTelemetry, Elastic, or Grafana ecosystems, or building custom exporters and instrumentation libraries
Published articles, conference talks, or open-source contributions in SRE or DevOps domains
Contribution to SRE community through mentorship, speaking, or knowledge sharing

Responsibilities

Set technical direction and establish long-term reliability strategies for IFS cloud products supporting the A&D industry
Partner with R&D, Product, and Customer Success leadership to define reliability requirements and drive architectural decisions
Design and oversee implementation of enterprise-scale observability, automation, and incident response platforms
Lead architectural assessments and provide recommendations on infrastructure resilience, capacity planning, and disaster recovery
Drive adoption of SRE best practices across product teams, establishing metrics and accountability for reliability
Own proactive performance monitoring for Ultra HA on Exadata customers — database health, workload profiles, wait events, and application response times — and act on trends before they breach SLA
Lead deep performance investigations spanning the Oracle database, application servers, and infrastructure, producing evidence-based tuning and capacity recommendations
Design and maintain the performance observability stack (Elastic, Grafana, OpenTelemetry/APM), including dashboards, baselines, and alert thresholds tied to customer SLOs
Run performance baselining, load testing, and pre-release validation for Ultra HA environments, and quantify the impact of changes before they reach production
Produce customer-facing performance reporting and participate in service reviews for Ultra HA accounts
Lead resolution of long-running, complex, and critical incidents affecting A&D customers; establish escalation frameworks and decision-making protocols
Establish incident command systems, on-call rotations, and escalation procedures that balance response speed with team sustainability
Drive post-incident review processes that focus on identifying systemic improvements rather than individual blame
Establish incident trends analysis and drive prevention of recurrence through root cause elimination
Champion the elimination of toil through intelligent automation, leveraging AI to reduce redundant, admin-heavy tasks
Design and implement self-healing systems, automated remediation, and predictive alerting to minimize manual intervention
Establish continuous improvement programs that measure, track, and drive down Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)
Drive infrastructure-as-code adoption, standardization, and versioning across cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP)
Establish runbook automation and GitOps practices for reliable, auditable deployments
Establish knowledge management frameworks and internal KBAs that guide support operations for cloud-based applications
Create and maintain architecture documentation, disaster recovery playbooks, and operational runbooks
Lead documentation standards that ensure knowledge is accessible, accurate, and actionable for all support tiers
Identify systemic knowledge gaps and drive closure through training, documentation, and process improvement
Liaise with R&D and Unified Support Engineering to define automation requirements and platform capabilities for cloud applications
Partner with customer success and professional services teams to translate customer reliability requirements into technical strategies
Lead working groups and architecture reviews with multiple stakeholders to ensure reliability-first design decisions
Establish feedback loops between support operations and product development to drive product reliability improvements
Mentor and develop SRE team members, establishing technical mastery standards and career progression frameworks
Lead technical training programs on cloud operations, Kubernetes, performance engineering, and SRE methodologies
Foster a culture of learning, experimentation, and continuous improvement within the SRE organization
Establish on-call culture that balances operational needs with team well-being and sustainable practices