Senior Site Reliability Engineer (DevOps)

About Focus

Focus is a digital services firm dedicated to delivering on projects with impact in the civic tech space. We partner with states and federal agencies—including the Department of State, IRS, and the Department of Education—transform outdated systems into modern, efficient solutions that deliver better outcomes for citizens.

At Focus, we believe in doing impactful work while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. We encourage our team to log off at the end of the day, take time off when needed, and bring their best selves to work. We are intentional about staying on the cutting edge of our tooling and practices—from modern cloud development environments to integrating AI into our daily workflows—so our engineers spend their time solving hard problems, not fighting dull tools.

We are a fully remote company, and all employees must be based in the continental U.S. Some projects may require occasional travel, approximately 1-2 times per year.

Role Overview

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will own the reliability, deployability, and observability of complex, multi-vendor government platforms running in secure environments. You will build and maintain infrastructure as code in Terraform, design CI/CD pipelines, establish monitoring practices, and recommend SLOs to define and support system health. You’ll work closely with product teams, client stakeholders, and partner organizations, bringing SRE and DevOps practices to environments that are often in the middle of modernization.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform, including reusable modules and patterns that other teams can adopt.

• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines that support frequent, low-risk releases, with automated testing, security scanning, and promotion across environments.

• Define and track SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for critical services, and use them to guide reliability priorities and release decisions.

• Implement observability through metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and actionable alerts.

• Lead incident response and blameless postmortems, and drive follow-up work to completion. Participate in an on-call rotation as needed by the engagement.

• Troubleshoot complex, distributed systems across infrastructure, application, and network layers.

• Embed security and compliance into infrastructure and delivery, including vulnerability management, patching, secrets management, and support for ATO and continuous monitoring processes.

• Automate operational toil with scripts and tooling in languages such as Python, Go, or TypeScript.

• Serve as a technical advisor to client stakeholders, translating reliability and infrastructure tradeoffs into clear recommendations.

• Mentor teammates through code and infrastructure reviews, pairing, and documented runbooks and standards.

Skills & Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in SRE, DevOps, platform, or cloud infrastructure engineering.

• Significant hands-on experience with Terraform in production, including module design, state management, and running plan/apply workflows through CI.

• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins).

• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language, such as Python, Go, or TypeScript.

• Experience with observability tools (e.g., DataDog, CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus) and with designing meaningful alerts.

• Experience with containers and container orchestration (e.g., Docker, ECS, Kubernetes).

• Familiarity with FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, or ATO processes.

• Experience supporting legacy modernization or cloud migration efforts.

• Familiarity with AWS GovCloud environments, FedRAMP compliance standards, and observability tooling such as DataDog.

Requirements

• Legal authorization to work in the United States

• Ability to meet any other requirements for government contracts for which candidates are hired

• Work authorization that doesn’t require visa sponsorship, now or in the future

• May be subject to a government background check or security clearance, depending on the contract