Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Applaudo Studios•Louisville, KY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Site Reliability Engineer owns the reliability, design, implementation, and continuous improvement of infrastructure supporting restaurant technology for a global quick-service restaurant brand. The role spans cloud platforms and CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes-based edge systems deployed in restaurants, enterprise networking, mobile deployments, MDM platforms, and operational automation. It combines strategic architecture with hands-on execution and emphasizes permanent fixes and automation over repetitive manual work. The engineer works closely with Global Reliability Engineering, DevOps, and security teams. The position follows a hybrid schedule, with on-site presence on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Louisville, Kentucky, and includes on-call coverage. It operates under a contractor model.

Requirements

At least 6 years of experience in IT infrastructure, including at least 3 years focused on site reliability engineering, cloud architecture, or platform engineering.
Hands-on experience with AWS, including VPC, EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, IAM, RDS, and S3.
Working experience with Microsoft Azure.
Experience designing scalable, secure, and highly available cloud architectures, primarily on AWS.
Strong Kubernetes and container orchestration expertise (EKS, AKS), including edge or distributed deployments.
Experience with Terraform for infrastructure provisioning.
Experience designing and building CI/CD pipelines with GitLab CI/CD.
Experience defining and operating against SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
Experience with enterprise networking, including switch configuration, VLANs, and network troubleshooting.
Familiarity with Mobile Device Management platforms.
Strong automation and scripting skills using Python, Bash, Go, or equivalent.
Ability to build internal tooling and API integrations beyond configuring managed services.
Knowledge of cloud security best practices, including IAM strategy, network segmentation, encryption, and secrets management.
Experience leading incident response and blameless post-incident reviews.
Comfort working in Linux command-line environments.
Reliability-first mindset and comfort working across cloud, edge, networking, and device management.
Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to provide technical leadership and mentorship.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing serverless architectures with AWS Lambda, Fargate, API Gateway, and EventBridge.
Experience with DevSecOps tooling, including SAST, DAST, container scanning, and IaC scanning.
Familiarity with security frameworks such as CIS, NIST, ISO 27001, and SOC 2.
AWS and/or Azure certifications.
Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, or SIEM solutions.
Background in restaurant, retail, or distributed edge technology environments.
Experience using AI-assisted development tools for scripting, troubleshooting, and documentation.
Windows familiarity where restaurant endpoints require it.

Responsibilities

Define and own SLOs and SLIs for restaurant technology systems, using error budgets to balance reliability with delivery velocity.
Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability platforms that provide meaningful signal.
Lead and participate in incident response for restaurant technology systems, including on-call coverage.
Lead blameless post-incident reviews, drive root cause analysis, and ensure permanent corrective actions are implemented.
Reduce mean time to detection and mean time to resolution through improved tooling, runbooks, and automation.
Proactively identify reliability risks across the stack and track and report system health to engineering leadership.
Design and implement scalable, secure, and highly available cloud architectures, primarily on AWS, with working knowledge of Azure.
Architect and manage containerized workloads on Kubernetes (EKS, AKS), including edge Kubernetes deployments in restaurant locations.
Design and implement serverless and container-based solutions using AWS Fargate and other managed services.
Develop and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform.
Own architecture across cloud, edge, networking, and device management for the restaurant technology stack.
Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI/CD and modern DevOps practices.
Build internal tools, automations, and middleware integrations to eliminate repetitive operational work.
Use AI-assisted development to speed up scripting, troubleshooting, and documentation.
Support mobile application deployments and troubleshoot deployment issues across restaurant endpoints.
Manage and optimize MDM platforms covering the restaurant device fleet.
Configure and troubleshoot enterprise networking, primarily switches and restaurant-facing network infrastructure.
Establish and enforce cloud governance, security policies, and architectural standards.
Conduct security architecture reviews to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps.
Integrate security into CI/CD pipelines through automated scanning, policy validation, and vulnerability management.
Collaborate with engineering, DevOps, and security teams to deliver secure-by-design solutions across cloud and restaurant technology.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams.
Create and maintain documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records.
Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and recommend improvements.