Senior Reliability & Optimization Engineer

DescriptionKforce is immediately seeking an experienced Senior Reliability & Optimization Engineer in support of our enterprise telecommunications and mass media client based in Greenwood Village, CO.Responsibilities:Platform Engineering (Primary):* Maintain and extend the Terraform modules that define our infrastructure; Audit AWS against state, detect drift, and reconcile it rather than letting the console diverge* Own the health of the GitLab CI/CD pipelines and enforce pipeline-only deployment with progressive promotion (dev, qa, uat, stage, prod); Never skip environments or patch production in the console* Operate the AWS footprint: EKS (blue/green upgrades, node groups, IRSA), Helm, and Istio; Data and messaging (Aurora, DocumentDB, Redis, Amazon MQ); Networking and edge (Route53, WAFv2, CloudFront); And storage (S3)* Keep resources current and tagged to standard and remediate scan-flagged vulnerabilities through IaC* Build, deploy, and validate releases across environments, including off-hours windows; Document release notes and runbooksOptimization:* Right-size and scale resources to meet SLAs at the lowest sustainable cost, distinguishing real demand growth from regressions and leaks, and recommending configuration changes that keep latency and spend on target* Partner with developers and test engineers to improve application performance and strengthen automated test coverage for reliability-sensitive changesReliability & Incident Response:* Own monitoring and alerting end to end: build DataDog/Splunk dashboards, tune thresholds and routing against SLAs, and pre-empt degradation* Provide first response, mitigation, recovery, and root-cause analysis for incidents and outages; Participate in on-call rotation and drive follow-ups to closureRequirements* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience* AWS operations: Strong hands-on experience operating AWS through both the console and Infrastructure as Code, across services such as EKS, S3, DocumentDB, Aurora/RDS, ElastiCache Redis, Lambda, Route53, WAFv2, and Amazon MQ* CI/CD: Experience maintaining GitLab (or comparable) CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application deployments, including multi-stage environment promotion* Containerized microservices: Production experience operating containerized microservice and web-based applications (Docker/Kubernetes)* Incident response: Demonstrated experience owning production incident triage, mitigation, and root-cause analysis under SLA pressure* Performance work: Experience benchmarking, performance testing, and optimizing resource usage and system behavior* Observability: Expertise with monitoring and alerting tooling such as DataDog and/or Splunk - building dashboards, tuning alert thresholds, and using telemetry to investigate latency, errors, and saturation* Source control: Familiar with Git-based source control and branch/merge-request workflows (e.g., GitLab)* Infrastructure as Code: Proficient with Terraform - reading, maintaining, and authoring modules; Managing state; and detecting and reconciling drift; Comfortable making changes through code and pipelines rather than the consoleJob TypeContractCompensation57 - $73