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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Lead Site Reliability Engineer

💰 $150,000 - $220,000

EngineeringSite ReliabilityDevOpsCloudPlatform

🎯 Role Definition

The Lead Site Reliability Engineer (Lead SRE) is a senior technical leader who partners with product, platform, and security teams to define and deliver the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of customer-facing systems and internal platforms. This role combines hands-on engineering (Kubernetes, IaC, automation, observability) with team leadership (mentoring, hiring, on-call management) and strategic ownership (SLO policy, capacity planning, disaster recovery). The ideal candidate drives reliability through automation, data-driven postmortems, and a continuous-improvement culture that reduces toil and increases uptime.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Principal DevOps Engineer
  • Senior Cloud/Platform Engineer with proven systems ownership
  • Engineering Manager with strong operational background

Advancement To:

  • Head of Site Reliability Engineering / Director of SRE
  • VP of Engineering (Platform / Infrastructure)
  • Principal Engineer / Distinguished Engineer (Infrastructure)

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineering Lead
  • Cloud Architecture Lead
  • Security Reliability Engineer (SecOps / Cloud Security)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the design, implementation, and operational ownership of highly available, cloud-native infrastructure across AWS, GCP, or Azure, ensuring services meet business SLAs and reliability targets.
  • Define, implement, and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets across multiple product teams, and use them to prioritize reliability work and incident remediation.
  • Architect and manage Kubernetes platform operations including cluster provisioning, upgrades, multi-cluster strategy, autoscaling, and operator lifecycle management to support developer productivity and service reliability.
  • Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to ensure repeatable, auditable, and version-controlled infrastructure deployment and drift remediation.
  • Design, own, and improve CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker) to enable fast, secure, and reliable application delivery with automated testing and rollback strategies.
  • Lead incident response and act as Incident Commander during major outages, coordinate cross-functional remediation, facilitate stakeholder communication, and publish timely incident status updates to customers and leadership.
  • Establish and run blameless post-incident reviews (RCA), create actionable remediation plans, track follow-through, and drive systemic fixes to prevent recurrence and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
  • Implement and evolve observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic) for metrics, logs, and distributed tracing to provide deep visibility into system health and performance.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks and runbooks using scripting or programming languages (Python, Go, Bash) and configuration management (Ansible, Salt, Chef) to reduce human toil and increase system reliability.
  • Drive capacity planning and performance optimization across compute, storage, and networking resources, forecasting needs to support product growth and avoiding resource bottlenecks.
  • Lead cost optimization for cloud infrastructure by implementing rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, spot instances, and workload placement strategies to reduce monthly cloud spend without compromising reliability.
  • Mentor and grow a team of SREs and platform engineers by providing technical guidance, conducting performance reviews, and defining career development plans to strengthen the organization's operational capabilities.
  • Partner with security, compliance, and networking teams to embed security controls into the platform, manage secrets, enforce least-privilege access, and satisfy compliance frameworks (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA as applicable).
  • Design and operationalize disaster recovery (DR) plans, backup strategies, RTO/RPO objectives, and cross-region failover testing to ensure business continuity under catastrophic failure scenarios.
  • Drive platform reliability features such as canary deployments, blue/green rollouts, feature flags, and chaos engineering experiments to validate resilience and reduce production risk.
  • Implement and maintain service meshes (Istio, Linkerd) and API gateway configurations for traffic management, observability, and secure service-to-service communication.
  • Own networking, DNS, load balancing, ingress, egress, and firewall architecture decisions for critical services and provide expert troubleshooting for network-related production incidents.
  • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to embed SRE practices earlier in the development lifecycle, advising on reliability trade-offs, performance budgets, and operational runbooks.
  • Create and maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and on-call guides; ensure runbooks are exercised through drills and integrated into on-call rotations.
  • Lead hiring, headcount planning, and resource allocation for the SRE organization, balancing business priorities, technical debt remediation, and scalability projects.
  • Establish and monitor operational KPIs and dashboards that communicate reliability posture, incident trends, and business impact to engineering leadership and executive stakeholders.
  • Integrate and manage streaming, messaging, and data infrastructure (Kafka, Pulsar, Redis, Postgres, Cassandra) to ensure operational reliability and performance for stateful systems.
  • Drive adoption of DevSecOps practices including SAST/DAST, dependency scanning, and supply-chain controls in CI/CD to reduce security-related outages and vulnerabilities.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory reliability analyses to inform capacity planning and performance tuning decisions.
  • Contribute to the organization's infrastructure and platform roadmap, prioritizing work that reduces operational risk and accelerates developer velocity.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate reliability goals into technical requirements and measurable outcomes.
  • Participate in sprint planning, on-call scheduling, and agile ceremonies to align SRE efforts with product delivery timelines.
  • Provide executive summaries and post-incident briefings for senior leadership and customer-facing stakeholders when required.
  • Evaluate and recommend third-party SaaS and managed services when they improve reliability and reduce operational overhead.
  • Facilitate cross-team workshops on runbooks, chaos testing, and incident response best practices to raise reliability awareness across engineering.
  • Maintain vendor relationships for observability, cloud managed services, and enterprise support contracts to ensure SLAs and escalation paths are clear.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep expertise in cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, S3, VPC), GCP (GKE, BigQuery), or Azure (AKS) — including networking, IAM, and cost controls.
  • Strong Kubernetes administration skills: cluster lifecycle, CRDs, operators, Kube-proxy, CNI, pod security policies, and scheduler tuning.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) proficiency: Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi with module design, state management, and CI integration.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK/EFK, Datadog, and experience implementing SLIs/SLOs and alerting strategy.
  • Automation and scripting: Python, Go, Bash for tooling, operators, and automation of runbooks and self-healing workflows.
  • CI/CD and release engineering: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker, or CircleCI — pipeline design, artifact management, and secure delivery.
  • Configuration management and orchestration: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or Salt for system provisioning and configuration drift prevention.
  • Incident management and on-call tooling: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps, Statuspage — experience owning major incidents and running incident command.
  • Networking, DNS, load balancing, and firewall expertise at scale including TCP/IP, BGP, and overlay networks.
  • Databases and stateful systems operations: Postgres, MySQL, Cassandra, Redis, and knowledge of replication, backups, and failover strategies.
  • Message streaming and event systems: Kafka, Pulsar, or RabbitMQ operations, tuning, and capacity planning.
  • Security and compliance controls in infrastructure: secrets management (Vault), IAM design, encryption in transit/at rest, and vulnerability management.
  • Service mesh and API gateways: Istio, Linkerd, Envoy, Kong — traffic routing, resilience, and observability at the mesh level.
  • Performance tuning and capacity forecasting using telemetry, load testing, and profiling tools.
  • Familiarity with chaos engineering tools (Gremlin, Chaos Mesh) and practice to validate resilience assumptions.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people management: coaching, mentoring, hiring, and conducting performance reviews for SRE teams.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills for cross-functional stakeholder engagement, incident communication, and executive reporting.
  • Strategic thinking with the ability to translate business reliability goals into technical roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
  • Proven ability to prioritize, make trade-offs, and drive decisions under ambiguity and high-pressure incidents.
  • Collaborative mindset: able to work closely with product, security, networking, and data teams to align on reliability and delivery.
  • Strong problem-solving skills and a data-driven approach to root cause analysis and continuous improvement.
  • Teaching and evangelism: ability to run workshops, training, and documentation drives to elevate engineering practices across the org.
  • Time management and organizational skills, balancing operational excellence with strategic project delivery.
  • Customer-focused orientation: empathy for internal/external customers and a bias for reducing failure modes that affect users.
  • Adaptability and resilience: comfortable with rapid change in high-growth, cloud-native environments.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or related technical field.
  • Certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems / Network Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 8+ years in systems/platform/cloud engineering with 3+ years in Site Reliability Engineering or SRE leadership.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years delivering production-grade distributed systems, with hands-on experience building and operating Kubernetes-based platforms.
  • Proven track record leading SRE teams, owning on-call rotations, incident management, and delivering measurable reliability improvements.
  • Experience operating at scale (multi-region, multi-account) and familiarity with enterprise security and compliance requirements.
  • Demonstrable examples of automation, cost optimization, successful DR testing, and SLO-driven improvements that materially reduced outages or MTTR.
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