Sr. Site Reliability Engineer III

Description Onsite in Washington, DC Our client seeks a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer III to design, automate, and operate mission-critical systems for federal environments. The role focuses on Kubernetes or VMWare platforms, CI/CD enablement, observability, and developer experience. You will reduce developer friction, strengthen reliability practices, and deliver secure, compliant infrastructure that supports agency objectives. Due to federal security clearance requirements, the applicant must be a United States Citizen with an active Top Secret clearance. This is a full-time, permanent opportunity, offering a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package. Qualified applicants must be willing and able to work on a w2 basis. Salary: $170,000 - $220,000/yr. w2 Responsibilities Design, deploy, and maintain mission-critical application workloads on virtualized or containerized environments such as VMWare or Kubernetes. Ensure scalability, availability, and compliance with government requirements. Develop and sustain automated CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and configuration management workflows across all environments. Provision, configure, and maintain developer environments and toolchains to enable secure and efficient workflows. Identify and reduce developer friction across the software development lifecycle. Implement observability and alerting to support defined service level objectives. Lead or participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement. Support container-native and object storage solutions such as MinIO, S3-compatible services, and PortWorx. Configure and manage enterprise load balancers such as F5 or similar platforms. Establish and maintain customer trust by delivering innovative solutions aligned to mission needs. Experience Requirements Active U.S. Government issued Top Secret security clearance. 7+ years in software development, systems engineering, or operations with accountability for production availability, performance, and reliability. Demonstrated experience blending software engineering and systems administration for highly available and scalable applications. Experience designing and managing monitoring, alerting, and observability to meet service level objectives. Experience leading or participating in incident response and root cause analysis. Experience with Ansible and Desired State Configuration. Experience with GitLab CI/CD automation and Bash scripting. Experience with container-native storage and object storage solutions such as MinIO, S3-compatible services, and PortWorx. Experience with enterprise load-balancing solutions such as F5 or similar. Ability to contribute immediately in a mission-critical operational environment with minimal ramp-up. Education Requirements Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related engineering field is preferred. DoD 8140-compliant certification such as Security+ or higher. #J-18808-Ljbffr