Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Arctiq•Irvine, CA

About The Position

Arctiq is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to support a client building an SRE Center of Excellence (CoE). Working with other SRE leaders and application teams, the role will establish reliability standards, release discipline, and a consistent operating model across applications. Dynatrace is already in place; the focus is on improving application reliability throughout the release lifecycle. The SRE team owns SLOs, production readiness, release gates, reliability practices, and incident follow-through. Observability standards and agent deployment remain with the Observability CoE and Platform teams. The work is delivered in defined waves, initially embedding with two or three application teams. The engineer will create reusable templates and a “golden path” that teams can operate independently, covering user journeys, SLOs, synthetics, dashboards, error budgets, alerting, and pipeline release checks. The role also participates in application on-call rotations, supports incident response and blameless reviews, trains team champions, and communicates progress and outcomes in clear language to technical and business stakeholders. The opportunity is a 6–9 month contract with potential extension. Success includes establishing a production-ready golden path for a critical application within the first 90 days, enabling teams to promote changes independently, and reviewing SLO and error-budget performance monthly alongside DORA metrics. A wave is complete when the application team can measure the reliability of a user journey and safely roll back a failed release—not merely when a dashboard exists.

Requirements

Strong SRE and reliability engineering experience, including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, production readiness, and DORA metrics.
Hands-on Dynatrace experience with RUM, services, synthetics, SLOs, alerting, dashboards, and distributed tracing.
Strong understanding of CI/CD, GitLab or similar tools, Infrastructure as Code, release controls, and automated reliability checks.
Experience with Kubernetes, APIs, client-server architectures, and blue-green or similar deployment strategies.
Strong knowledge of change management, incident response, on-call practices, ServiceNow, and production troubleshooting.
Experience embedding reliability practices throughout the software delivery lifecycle, from development through production.
Proven ability to lead engineers or SRE practices, establish standards, and drive adoption across application teams.
Strong communication skills and ability to work across engineering, application owners, and business stakeholders.
Outcome-focused approach and experience managing milestones, deliverables, ownership, and timelines.

Responsibilities

Embed with two or three application teams per wave and leave reusable reliability templates they can run independently.
Start reliability work from user journeys and define a small set of service-level indicators, targets, time windows, and error budgets.
Build SLOs in Dynatrace and maintain them as code so non-production and production remain aligned.
Create views that communicate SLO compliance, burn rate, and status to application owners and executives.
Configure alerting around error-budget burn, route alerts through the existing Dynatrace-to-ServiceNow path, and include runbook links in alert payloads.
Integrate production-readiness checks into delivery pipelines, including synthetic test success, reliability-baseline checks, and rollback testing.
Use blue-green or similar release strategies so a previous version can resume traffic when needed.
Report deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore, and relate DORA metrics to error budgets.
Join the on-call rotation for embedded applications and use Dynatrace and ServiceNow to investigate incidents and affected journeys or dependencies.
After reliability breaches, conduct blameless reviews and turn findings into runbooks or backlog items.
Communicate what was promised, shipped, blocked, and planned next in plain language for application owners and leadership.
Lead CoE work with other SRE leaders to establish a golden path, shared standards, and consistent criteria for evaluating waves.
Set reliability expectations, train a champion on each team, and hold error-budget reviews when targets are missed.
Establish a production-ready golden path for a critical application within the first 90 days.
Enable teams to independently promote changes using the SRE framework and templates, and review SLO and error-budget performance monthly.