Senior Engineer Site Reliability - Data Operations

Empower • Overland Park, KS

2d • $105,700 - $149,275

About The Position

The Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Data Platforms improves the reliability, observability, and operational maturity of cloud-based data platforms and production data pipelines. This SRE-focused role centers on production reliability and operational ownership, partnering with engineering teams responsible for primary pipeline development and core infrastructure. The engineer collaborates with Data Engineering, Cloud, Platform, Application, Security, and FinOps teams to improve production health, incident response, automation, observability, resilience, and operational efficiency.

The role owns and improves the reliability, availability, performance, and operational health of data platforms and pipelines. It involves monitoring pipeline execution and dependencies, troubleshooting complex production issues, strengthening observability and incident practices, automating operational work with Python, applying SRE principles, and developing runbooks and recovery procedures. The engineer participates in a PagerDuty on-call rotation, including occasional weekend coverage, and drives lasting improvements that reduce incidents and manual effort.

The position operates in a professional office environment. The posting describes a flexible work environment but does not specify this role's workplace type.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on AWS experience supporting production environments.
• Demonstrated experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Cloud Reliability Engineering.
• Strong practical understanding and implementation of SRE principles and production operations.
• Experience supporting Amazon Redshift or similar enterprise data platforms in production.
• Experience owning or supporting reliability and operations of production data pipelines or data-intensive services.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise observability platforms such as Datadog and Splunk.
• Strong Python programming skills for automation and operational tooling.
• Working knowledge of SQL for production investigation and troubleshooting.
• Strong understanding of Terraform and Infrastructure as Code, with the ability to read, review, and troubleshoot existing IaC.
• Experience with incident management, root-cause analysis, and implementing preventive and corrective actions.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills in complex production environments.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on production experience with Snowflake.
• Experience supporting multiple cloud-based data platforms.
• Experience designing observability for large-scale, distributed, or data-intensive systems.
• Experience with AIOps, intelligent automation, or agentic operations applied to production operations.
• Experience using AI-assisted approaches for incident detection, diagnosis, alert enrichment, runbook execution, operational automation, or guarded remediation.
• Familiarity with AWS-native monitoring services such as Amazon CloudWatch.
• Experience with data-pipeline orchestration, dependency management, failure recovery, and production support.
• Experience improving cloud-resource utilization and cost visibility.
• Experience helping establish or mature SRE practices within an engineering organization.

Responsibilities

• Own and improve the reliability, availability, performance, and operational health of production data platforms and pipelines.
• Monitor and support pipeline execution, dependencies, failures, delays, recovery, and downstream impact.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues across AWS, data platforms, pipelines, and supporting services.
• Design and improve observability with platforms such as Datadog and Splunk, including dashboards, alerting, logging, and service-health indicators.
• Improve signal quality, reduce alert noise, and strengthen incident detection and diagnosis.
• Lead or participate in production incident response, service restoration, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions.
• Use Python to automate operational tasks, monitoring, health checks, remediation, and repetitive support activities.
• Apply SRE practices including service-level objectives, incident management, operational readiness, capacity planning, resilience, disaster recovery, and reduction of operational toil.
• Use SQL for production troubleshooting, validation, and investigation.
• Understand and troubleshoot infrastructure managed through Terraform and Infrastructure as Code, partnering with Cloud or Platform Engineering when deeper infrastructure changes are required.
• Identify recurring operational issues and drive sustainable engineering improvements.
• Contribute to performance, capacity, and cost-efficiency improvements across AWS and data-platform services.
• Develop and improve operational runbooks and recovery procedures.
• Participate in the PagerDuty on-call rotation, including occasional weekend coverage.
• Understand production platform and pipeline behavior, recognize reliability risks, diagnose issues, restore service, and implement lasting improvements.
• Use observability and automation to shift operations toward proactive reliability engineering, reducing recurring incidents and manual operational effort while improving resilience.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• 401(k) plan with generous 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.
• Business-casual environment with the option to wear jeans.
• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed