Senior Site Reliability Engineer

i4DM • Millersville, MD

5d

About The Position

We are seeking an experienced and highly motivated Senior Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a key technical contributor supporting the Technical Director in advancing site reliability engineering, cloud operations, automation, and resilient service delivery for VA enterprise healthcare platforms and applications. In this role, you will partner closely with the Technical Director, Program Manager, Maintenance Technical Director, Monitoring & Incident Management teams, and VA stakeholders to improve availability, performance, scalability, and operational excellence across mission-critical, 24x7 enterprise environments. The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will apply software engineering principles to operations by automating infrastructure and workflows, defining and measuring reliability targets, strengthening observability, supporting incident response, and continuously improving system resiliency while aligning with Federal security and governance requirements.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, cloud operations, or related roles supporting enterprise or mission-critical environments.
• Hands-on experience supporting cloud platforms (AWS preferred), Linux-based environments, and distributed systems at scale.
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or comparable technologies.
• Experience with containers and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, EKS, ECS, or Docker in production environments.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation in support of secure, reliable software delivery.
• Strong understanding of monitoring, observability, incident response, root cause analysis, and performance optimization principles.
• Proficiency with one or more scripting or programming languages such as Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex systems, automate operational tasks, and collaborate effectively across engineering and operations teams.
• Candidates must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance.

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting VA, Federal Government, or other regulated environments with strong security and compliance requirements.
• Experience defining and operationalizing SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and service health metrics for production systems.
• Familiarity with observability platforms and tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, ELK, Splunk, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with FedRAMP, NIST, Zero Trust, or other Federal security frameworks relevant to cloud and platform operations.
• Experience supporting healthcare platforms, high-availability enterprise services, or large-scale modernization initiatives.
• Relevant certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Terraform Associate, or SRE/DevOps certifications.

Responsibilities

• Site Reliability Engineering & Service Ownership: Partner with the Technical Director to implement and mature Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across platform services and hosted applications. Improve the full service lifecycle from design and deployment through operation and continuous refinement, with a focus on availability, latency, performance, efficiency, and capacity. Define, track, and report service level indicators (SLIs), service level objectives (SLOs), and error budgets to guide engineering decisions and service improvements.
• Automation, CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code: Build, enhance, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that enable secure, automated, and repeatable application and infrastructure delivery. Develop and support Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and configuration automation using tools such as Terraform and Ansible to improve consistency, speed, and auditability. Integrate automated testing, validation, and security checks into delivery workflows to improve release quality and reduce change-related risk.
• Observability, Reliability & Performance Engineering: Design and improve monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and dashboards to strengthen observability and accelerate issue detection and response. Analyze system behavior and performance trends to improve reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency across distributed and cloud-native environments. Reduce operational toil by automating repetitive tasks, improving runbooks, and engineering sustainable solutions for recurring operational issues.
• Cloud Engineering & Modernization: Support cloud infrastructure and platform services in AWS and containerized environments such as Kubernetes, ensuring systems are resilient, scalable, and secure. Contribute to platform modernization efforts by improving deployment patterns, environment consistency, and operational readiness for cloud-native services. Assist with capacity planning, reliability reviews, and architectural improvements to support growth, resilience, and mission continuity.
• Security & Compliance Integration: Implement reliability engineering practices that align with Federal security requirements, including secure configuration, least privilege, vulnerability remediation, and policy-based controls. Partner with cybersecurity and engineering teams to support secure-by-design infrastructure and application delivery practices. Help ensure operational processes and automation align with compliance expectations for Federal and VA environments.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with development, platform, operations, monitoring, incident management, and architecture teams to improve service reliability and deployment outcomes. Work closely with the Technical Director and team leads to translate technical direction into actionable engineering improvements and operational standards. Support Agile and SAFe delivery practices by helping teams adopt reliable release processes, operational readiness checks, and continuous improvement measures.
• Incident Support & Continuous Improvement: Participate in incident response, service restoration, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews for critical systems and services. Identify recurring issues, reliability gaps, and failure patterns, and drive corrective actions through automation, architectural improvements, and process refinement. Contribute to on-call readiness, operational documentation, and blameless continuous improvement practices that improve resilience and reduce mean time to recovery.

What This Job Offers

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