Site Reliability Engineer

Job Title: Site Reliability Engineer



Location: Sunnyvale, CA



Experience Required: 10+ years



Employment Type: W2



Work Authorization: All visa types considered except H1B

Job Summary:
Seeking an experienced engineer who can analyze, diagnose, and optimize the performance and reliability of large-scale distributed systems. This role requires deep technical understanding across the entire application stack, the ability to read and reason about code, and the capability to provide data-backed answers to both engineering teams and business stakeholders.

This role goes beyond traditional operations or DevOps. The successful candidate will think like a software engineer, act like a systems engineer, and operate with a production-first mindset.

Key Responsibilities:

Performance & Reliability Engineering

• Analyze and resolve performance issues such as high latency, slow login, throughput degradation, and system instability.
• Perform deep, end-to-end investigations across the full stack, including load balancers and traffic routing, web server and application runtime configurations, middleware and messaging systems, database performance (queries, indexing, pooling), Kubernetes clusters (pods, resources, scaling behavior), and Linux OS tuning (CPU, memory, I/O, ulimits, networking).
• Identify root causes and propose clear, actionable engineering solutions.

Distributed Systems Design

• Design, review, and influence high-performance, highly available distributed architectures.
• Evaluate trade-offs related to scalability, latency, fault tolerance, and cost.
• Partner with development teams early to prevent reliability and performance issues before production.

Capacity Planning & Scalability

• Assess system readiness for growth scenarios (e.g., onboarding 10,000 additional users within six months).
• Perform capacity and scale analysis across application tiers, databases, messaging systems, and Kubernetes compute and storage.
• Provide evidence-based recommendations supported by metrics, benchmarks, and production data.

Engineering Collaboration

• Work with software engineering teams to review performance-critical code paths and propose improvements at the code, configuration, or infrastructure level.
• Improve system observability (metrics, logs, traces).
• Communicate complex technical findings clearly to both engineers and business stakeholders.

Required Technical Skills:

• Strong understanding of distributed systems and performance engineering.
• Ability to read, analyze, and troubleshoot Java code.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (resource management, scaling, container behavior), Linux internals and tuning, and PostgreSQL (queries, indexing, performance optimization).
• Proven experience building or operating high-availability, high-throughput systems.
• Hands-on experience with Azure cloud services.
• Strong scripting skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar).
• Experience with deployment pipelines, automation, and monitoring tools.
• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure, networking, and application operations.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a data-driven approach.

LLM & AI Experience:

• Practical experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Familiarity with applying LLMs to engineering or operational workflows.

Nice to Have:

• Messaging systems such as ActiveMQ.
• Load testing and benchmarking experience.
• Background in SRE, Performance Engineering, or Platform Engineering roles.

Professional Attributes:

• Strong desire to learn and deeply understand complex systems.
• Self-starter with the ability to take ownership and drive initiatives independently.
• Demonstrates leadership, accountability, and a problem-solving mindset.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.