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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for AEM Cloud Site Reliability Engineer

💰 $ - $

AEMSite ReliabilityDevOpsCloud

🎯 Role Definition

The AEM Cloud Site Reliability Engineer (AEM Cloud SRE) is a hybrid software and operations engineer responsible for designing, building, operating, and optimizing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud-native deployments. This role focuses on reliability, performance, security, automation and cost-efficiency of AEM environments across author and publish clusters, Dispatcher, and integrated services using Cloud Manager, Kubernetes, containerization, observability tooling, and CI/CD pipelines. The SRE partners with development teams, product owners, security and infrastructure teams to drive platform maturity, incident prevention, rapid remediation, and continuous deployment of high-quality digital experiences.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • AEM Developer or Senior AEM Developer
  • DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer with AEM exposure
  • Cloud Platform Engineer or SRE in a web/content platform context

Advancement To:

  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer, AEM Platform Lead
  • Platform Engineering Manager / Head of SRE
  • Digital Platforms Architect (Experience Cloud / AEM)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer (Kubernetes, AWS/GCP/Azure)
  • DevOps Engineer specializing in CI/CD & automation
  • Technical Program Manager for Experience Platforms

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and operate AEM Cloud Service and AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) environments using Cloud Manager pipelines, ensuring repeatable, secure, and automated builds and deployments for author and publish instances.
  • Build, maintain and optimize CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Cloud Manager) for AEM projects, automating builds, integration tests, package deployments, database migrations, and rollback strategies to minimize release risk.
  • Configure and manage Dispatcher caching strategies and edge configurations to maximize cache hit rates, improve page response times, and reduce origin load while validating cache invalidation workflows across content deployments.
  • Design and implement containerization and orchestration for AEM components (Kubernetes, Docker), collaborating with platform teams to manage pods, namespaces, services and ingress rules for scalable AEM deployments.
  • Implement robust observability and monitoring for AEM environments using tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana and Cloud native logging to capture JVM metrics, request traces, dispatcher logs, replication queues and health checks.
  • Lead incident response and on-call rotations: triage production issues, perform root cause analysis, coordinate remediation, produce incident reports, and implement corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
  • Optimize JVM, Sling, OSGi bundles and JCR performance: tune garbage collection, thread pools, repository compaction, and CRX/Oak settings for consistent, predictable AEM runtime behavior at scale.
  • Design and execute capacity planning, performance testing, load testing and benchmarking of AEM publish clusters and author environments to ensure headroom for traffic spikes and campaign launches.
  • Harden AEM security posture: implement secure repository policies, manage TLS/SSL, authentication/authorization integration (SAML, OAuth), enforce least privilege, perform vulnerability scans, and coordinate patching and upgrades in line with compliance requirements.
  • Automate provisioning and infrastructure-as-code for cloud resources (Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation) used by AEM environments, ensuring reproducible environments across dev, staging and production.
  • Manage content replication workflows, ensure reliable replication between author and publish instances, troubleshoot replication queue backlogs, and tune replication agents for large content imports.
  • Drive upgrades and migrations for AEM versions and dispatcher/Cloud Manager releases, plan compatibility testing for bundles, code, and third-party integrations, and coordinate cross-functional cutovers.
  • Implement AEM-specific automation and tooling (ACS AEM Commons, Sling Feature Model, Content Package Maven Plugin) to accelerate deployments and enforce platform standards.
  • Collaborate with application developers to design fault-tolerant, resource-efficient bundles and templates, perform code reviews focusing on resource management (threads, caches, connections) and advise on best practices for HTL, Sling models and OSGi components.
  • Maintain backup, disaster recovery and business continuity plans for AEM repositories and assets, test restore procedures, and document RTO/RPO targets with stakeholders.
  • Manage integrations between AEM and experience toolchain: Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, search providers, CDN configurations and external microservices, troubleshooting cross-system failures and latency.
  • Implement release governance and deployment gating (smoke tests, synthetic monitoring, canary deployments, blue/green strategies) to reduce risk while enabling continuous delivery.
  • Track and optimize operational costs across cloud resources and third-party services associated with AEM deployments; propose cost-saving architecture or configuration changes without sacrificing reliability.
  • Build and maintain automated health checks, synthetic transactions and alerting rules tuned to business KPIs (page load times, transaction success rates, image delivery, cache hit ratio).
  • Maintain comprehensive runbooks, run-level playbooks and onboarding documentation for common production issues and operational tasks; enable faster ramp-up for new engineers.
  • Mentor and train development and operations teams on AEM Cloud best practices, reliability engineering principles, and platform-specific operational tasks.
  • Evaluate and onboard third-party tools and managed services that complement the AEM platform, including CDNs, image optimization services, search/indexing systems, and observability enhancements.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis related to platform performance, capacity and cost trends.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap as it pertains to observability and telemetry for AEM experiences.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate digital experience requirements into reliability and deployment engineering work.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the cloud platform and data engineering teams.
  • Create internal training materials and run internal tech sessions to improve platform literacy across development teams.
  • Work with procurement and vendor management to evaluate SLAs for managed AEM services and ensure contractual reliability commitments are met.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) deep knowledge: AEM as a Cloud Service, AEM 6.x author/publish architecture, Sling, JCR/Oak, OSGi lifecycle and bundles, HTL and ACS AEM Commons.
  • Cloud Manager experience: configuring Cloud Manager pipelines, deployment profiles, programmatic integration and release promotion workflows.
  • Container orchestration and cloud-native platforms: Kubernetes, Docker, Helm charts, and experience operating Kubernetes clusters in AWS/GCP/Azure.
  • CI/CD tooling: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Maven, Cloud Manager pipelines, Content Package Maven Plugin and automation of builds and packages.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation or ARM templates to provision networking, compute and storage for AEM workloads reproducibly.
  • Monitoring & observability: Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry) and designing meaningful SLOs/SLIs.
  • Performance and load testing: JMeter, Gatling, BlazeMeter or similar tools and experience interpreting JVM/Sling performance metrics and tuning GC and heap settings.
  • Dispatcher and CDN configuration: Varnish/Dispatcher caching rules, invalidation strategies, CDN (Akamai, CloudFront) integration to accelerate delivery and protect origin.
  • Java expertise: JVM tuning, profiling (VisualVM, YourKit), multi-threaded debugging, memory leak detection and optimization for servlet-based apps.
  • Security and compliance: experience with secure coding practices, TLS, authentication integration (LDAP, SAML, OAuth), and vulnerability remediation processes.
  • Backup and disaster recovery: repository backup strategies, CRX/Oak consistency, restore procedures and RTO/RPO validation.
  • Scripting and automation: Python, Bash, Groovy, Node.js for automation of operational tasks and tool integrations.
  • Source control and branching strategies: Git workflows, code review processes, and release tagging best practices.
  • Networking and load balancers: HTTP(s) load balancing, DNS, TLS termination, routing, and firewall/NACL configuration.
  • Data integration and APIs: RESTful services, GraphQL, experience integrating AEM with analytics, personalization and headless content APIs.

Soft Skills

  • Strong incident management and communication skills: calm under pressure, clear incident postmortems, and cross-team coordination.
  • Analytical mindset with strong troubleshooting and root cause analysis capabilities.
  • Collaborative: able to partner with development, QA, product, security and infra teams to deliver reliable digital experiences.
  • Customer-obsessed: prioritizes user impact, cares about performance and availability from the end-user perspective.
  • Continuous improvement orientation: advocates automation, observability, and technical debt reduction.
  • Teaching and mentoring: can elevate team capability through training, code reviews and knowledge sharing.
  • Business acumen: aligns reliability trade-offs with business priorities and cost constraints.
  • Adaptability: comfortable in fast-moving Agile environments and with evolving cloud-native tooling.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related technical field; OR equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline.
  • Certifications (optional but valuable): Adobe Certified Expert (AEM), Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), AWS/GCP/Azure cloud certifications, Terraform/HashiCorp Certified.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8+ years of relevant experience with increasing responsibility; 5+ years preferred for senior roles.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years specifically working with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) in production.
  • 2+ years operating cloud-native or containerized production platforms (Kubernetes/Docker).
  • Demonstrated experience in site reliability, DevOps or platform engineering supporting web/content platforms at scale.
  • Track record of automating operational processes, building CI/CD pipelines, and managing complex incident responses.
  • Experience working in Agile teams and supporting 24/7 operations with on-call responsibilities and documented runbooks.
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