Senior Site Reliability Engineer

What are we building? Hard Rock Digital is a team focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We’re building a team that resonates passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight and strive to ensure we’re always acting authentically. Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We’re taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space - ready to join us? What’s the position? We are looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer who combines deep infrastructure expertise with a forward-thinking approach to AI-driven operations. In this role you will maintain and improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of our Java-based applications while pioneering the use of large language models (LLMs), agentic workflows, and intelligent automation to transform how we monitor, respond to, and prevent incidents. You will design and build autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents that consume observability data, triage alerts, generate runbooks, automate incident response steps, and surface actionable insights—reducing toil and accelerating mean time to resolution. This is a hands‑on engineering role for someone who is equally comfortable tuning a JVM, writing PromQL, and prototyping an agentic pipeline with tool‑calling LLMs. Key Responsibilities Application Reliability & Performance Ensure the availability, reliability, and performance of high‑traffic Java‑based applications in a distributed environment. Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across production and non‑production environments. Participate in pre‑ and post‑deployment performance testing and monitoring to continuously improve application performance. Optimize Java application performance with a focus on JVM tuning, efficient resource utilization, and horizontal scaling. Monitoring, Observability & AIOps Deploy and manage the Grafana stack (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Mimir, Alloy) to deliver real‑time monitoring, logging, and alerting. Implement and refine observability strategies that enhance visibility into application and infrastructure health. Create and maintain dashboards, alerts, and log queries for comprehensive system health monitoring. Integrate AI/ML models into the observability pipeline for anomaly detection, predictive alerting, and intelligent alert correlation and noise reduction. AI & Agentic Workflow Engineering Design, build, and operate agentic AI workflows that automate operational tasks such as alert triage, root cause analysis, runbook execution, and incident summarization. Develop tool‑calling LLM agents that interact with infrastructure APIs (Kubernetes, Grafana, Jira, Slack, PagerDuty) to execute diagnostic and remediation actions autonomously or with human‑in‑the‑loop approval. Build and maintain MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and integrations that expose internal systems as tool surfaces for AI agents. Evaluate, select, and operationalize LLM frameworks and orchestration platforms (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, n8n, or custom solutions) for production‑grade agentic systems. Implement guardrails, evaluation harnesses, and feedback loops to ensure AI agent outputs are accurate, safe, and continuously improving. Champion the adoption of AI‑assisted development and operations practices across the SRE and broader engineering organization. Incident Management & Root Cause Analysis Support the operations team’s incident response efforts, conduct post‑mortems, and identify root causes to prevent recurrence. Leverage AI tools to accelerate incident timelines, auto‑generate post‑mortem drafts, and surface patterns across historical incidents. Document and share lessons learned, contributing to a culture of continuous improvement. Automation & Toil Reduction Identify repetitive operational workflows and engineer AI‑augmented or fully automated replacements. Build self‑service tools and chatbot interfaces that allow engineering teams to query system status, retrieve logs, and execute standard operating procedures through natural language. Measure and report on toil reduction metrics to quantify the impact of automation initiatives. Collaboration & Cross‑functional Support Work closely with developers, architects, and data/ML engineers to design solutions that improve reliability and leverage AI capabilities. Collaborate with DevOps and NOC teams to support the application platform. Communicate SRE practices, AI/automation capabilities, and operational insights to technical and non‑technical stakeholders. Provide feedback on application performance, potential improvements, and observability metrics. Why This Role Is Different This is not a traditional SRE position with AI bolted on as an afterthought. We are building a team that treats AI and agentic automation as core competencies—on par with Kubernetes expertise or observability design. You will have the autonomy to experiment with cutting‑edge AI tools, the backing of leadership to deploy them in production, and a mandate to measurably reduce operational toil through intelligent systems. What are we looking for? Core SRE & Infrastructure (Required) Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience. 5+ years in SRE, DevOps, or similar infrastructure roles with experience managing large‑scale, high‑availability production systems. 3+ years hands‑on experience managing production Kubernetes clusters, including deep understanding of architecture, networking, storage, and security. Experience with cluster autoscaling (Karpenter), upgrades, and multi‑cluster management. Proficiency with kubectl, Helm, Kubernetes operators, and container orchestration troubleshooting. Advanced expertise with the Grafana observability stack: dashboards, alerting, visualization, and Grafana Alloy for telemetry collection. Proficiency in PromQL and experience with Loki for log aggregation and analysis. Hands‑on experience managing Java‑based applications in distributed environments, including JVM tuning and optimization. Cloud platform expertise (AWS preferred; GCP or Azure also valued). Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform/Terragrunt or Ansible. ArgoCD proficiency for GitOps workflows and continuous deployment. Strong scripting abilities in Python, Bash, or Go, with experience building CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation. Proven track record with on‑call rotations, incident response, and root cause analysis. AI, Automation & Agentic Systems (Required) 1+ years of practical experience building or operating AI/LLM‑powered tools, agents, or workflows in a production or production‑adjacent context. Demonstrated ability to design agentic systems that use tool calling, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), or multi‑step reasoning to accomplish operational tasks. Experience integrating LLM APIs (e.g., Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, or open‑source models) into backend services or automation pipelines. Familiarity with at least one agentic orchestration framework or workflow engine (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, n8n, Temporal, or equivalent). Understanding of prompt engineering best practices, including structured outputs, system prompts, and few‑shot examples. Familiarity with AI‑assisted coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and their integration into engineering workflows. Experience building or consuming MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to expose internal tools to AI agents. Awareness of AI safety, hallucination mitigation, and human‑in‑the‑loop design patterns for autonomous systems. Preferred / Bonus Hands‑on experience with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector) for RAG‑based knowledge retrieval. Experience with LLM evaluation frameworks (e.g., Galileo, LangSmith, Braintrust) for monitoring agent quality in production. Contributions to open‑source AI/ML or SRE tooling projects. Background in data engineering or ML pipelines that complements SRE responsibilities. Soft Skills Strong communication skills (written and verbal) with the ability to translate complex AI and infrastructure concepts for diverse audiences. Proactive problem‑solver with a bias toward automation and continuous improvement. Ability to mentor junior team members on both traditional SRE practices and emerging AI‑driven approaches. Positive attitude and openness to constructive feedback. What’s in it for you? We offer our employees more than just competitive compensation. Our team benefits include: Competitive pay and benefits Flexible vacation allowance A hybrid / remote working environment Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand Roster of Uniques We care deeply about every interaction our customers have with us, and trust and empower our staff to own and drive their experience. Our vision for our business and customers is built on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where regardless of background or beliefs you feel able to be authentic and bring all your talent into play. We want to celebrate you being you (we are an equal opportunity employer). #J-18808-Ljbffr Hard Rock Digital