Systems Engineer – Site Reliability Engineering

Marriott•Bethesda, MD

12h•$87,300 - $151,800•Hybrid

About The Position

The Systems Engineer - Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is responsible for the reliability, scalability, and performance of mission-critical cloud and on-prem services that support millions of Marriot customers globally. This role involves overseeing incident management, driving automation efforts, and working closely with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment between SRE strategy and business objectives. Partners closely with Product Teams, Applications teams, Infrastructure, and the broader Applications and Infrastructure Delivery teams to develop key metrics and KPIs to improve applications stability, availability and performance. The ideal candidate will bring strong communication skills, collaborating with key stakeholders across the company to optimize cloud infrastructure and uphold the highest standards of operational excellence in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.

Requirements

Undergraduate degree in an engineering or computer science discipline and/or equivalent experience/certification
5+ years of hands-on experience in designing, building and operating production grade systems including:
2+ years of experience as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), building and managing highly available and mission critical systems
Deep understanding of SRE practices, such as Service Level Objectives, Error Budgets, Toil Management, Observability & Monitoring, Blameless Postmortems, Incident Response Process, Capacity Planning
Expertise in AWS services including designing highly available, multi-AZ and multi-region architectures, for example:
Compute: EC2, Auto Scaling, Lambda
Containers: EKS (Mandatory), ECS (good to have)
Networking: VPC, subnets, route tables, NAT gateways, Transit Gateway
Security: IAM roles/Policies, KMS, Secret manager
Storage and Databases: S3, EBS, EFS, RDS, DocumentDB.
Proven automation and programming experience in one or more of the following languages: Python, PowerShell
Experience using modern, continuous development techniques and pipelines (e.g. Agile, Kanban, Jira, CI/CD, Helm, Harness, Jenkins, Git, Artifactory, Vault)
Experience designing and implementing end-to-end observability solutions across metrics, logs, and traces using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, and OpenTelemetry.
Hands-on experience with Linux administration (RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS, AWS Linux)
Experience troubleshooting API-related issues in distributed systems, including latency, authentication/authorization failures, rate limiting, and upstream/downstream dependency failures.
Experience with containerization orchestration engines such as Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, ACK)
Familiarity with service mesh technologies to enable secure and resilient service communication, including mTLS, traffic shaping, and policy enforcement.
Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Iac) tools like Terraform and CloudFormation.
Familiarity with configuration management and automation tools such as Ansible.
Familiarity with vulnerability management, OS hardening, patching, security compliance of infrastructure, applications and databases
Understanding of basic networking fundamentals

Nice To Haves

Experience driving cloud cost optimization initiatives (rightsizing, reserved instances, autoscaling strategies, cost observability)
Networking expertise including Load Balancing, Firewalls, Security Groups, NACLs, TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, SSL/TLS etc

Responsibilities

Ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of mission-critical cloud services, implementing best practices for monitoring, alerting, and incident management.
Oversee the management of high-severity incidents, driving quick resolution and post-incident analysis to identify root causes and prevent recurrence.
Drive the automation of operational processes and ensure systems can scale effectively to support growing user demand, optimizing cloud and on-prem infrastructure and resource usage.
Develop and execute the SRE strategy aligned with business goals, and communicate service health, reliability, and performance metrics to senior leadership and stakeholders.
Assess application architectures to identify key monitoring points.
Identify Key Performance Indicators, apply monitoring, and report out on compliance.
Gather information to develop reporting metrics and KPIs.
Ensure that all applications adhere to appropriate monitoring standards based on their technology/business process.
Determine forums and cadence to provide regular monitoring updates.
Collaborates with Enterprise Application and Architecture and Infrastructure teams to continuously improve processes and procedures.
Liaises with vendors and Service Providers to select services and tools that best meet company goals.
Develops specific goals and plans to prioritize, organize, and accomplish work.
Champions leaders’ vision for product and service delivery.
Executes the necessary decisions to keep moving forward toward achievement of goals.
Determines priorities, schedules, plans and necessary resources to promote completion of any projects on schedule.
Understands and meets the needs of key stakeholders.
Communicates concepts in a clear and persuasive manner that is easy to understand.
Demonstrates an understanding of business priorities.
Supports achievement of performance goals, budget goals, team goals, etc.
Provides technical expertise within own and other teams.
Provides recommendations to improve the effectiveness of processes and programs.
Demonstrates advanced knowledge of job-relevant issues, products, systems, and processes.
Keeps up-to-date technically and applies new knowledge to job.
Performs other reasonable duties as required for this position.