Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

$160,000–$200,000 + bonus + stock options

Keep mission-critical AI systems reliable, secure, and recoverable

BluJuniper is an AI and optimization company building advanced software systems for complex operational environments. Our work spans cloud-native platforms, computer vision, natural language processing, data infrastructure, secure collaboration, and mission-focused AI/ML applications.

We are looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help build, operate, and scale the infrastructure powering our mission-critical software systems.

Our applications support thousands of users in environments where availability, security, performance, and recoverability are essential. We need an engineer who understands what it takes to run production systems at scale, prevent failures, respond effectively when things go wrong, and continuously improve the reliability of the systems they support.

This is a hands-on engineering role with significant ownership over AWS infrastructure, infrastructure as code, observability, incident response, database reliability, and disaster recovery.

You will work closely with software engineers, AI/ML teams, security engineers, and technical leadership to build infrastructure that is reliable, secure, observable, and capable of supporting rapid product development.

We are looking for someone who takes ownership of production systems, makes sound engineering decisions under pressure, and enjoys solving complex infrastructure problems.

About the Role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will design, maintain, and improve the systems and engineering practices that keep our production applications reliable.

You will work across AWS infrastructure, distributed backend services, relational databases, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring systems, and disaster recovery architecture.

Your responsibilities will extend beyond infrastructure provisioning and routine operations. You will help engineering teams design systems that can withstand failures, deploy changes safely, recover quickly from incidents, and scale as demand increases.

You will play an important role in improving BluJuniper's operational maturity by automating manual processes, strengthening observability, reducing recurring incidents, and making production reliability a core part of our engineering culture.

This position is ideal for someone who has personally operated mission-critical systems and wants meaningful ownership over the infrastructure behind advanced software products.

AWS Infrastructure and Automation

• Design, deploy, and maintain secure, scalable, and highly available production infrastructure on AWS.
• Develop and maintain Terraform infrastructure as code, including reusable modules, remote state management, and safe changes to live environments.
• Work with AWS networking, VPCs, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, SQS, Lambda, and related services.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, infrastructure validation, and rollback procedures.
• Automate operational processes to reduce manual work, configuration drift, and deployment risk.

Observability and Production Reliability

• Build and improve production observability using Datadog, including APM, distributed tracing, logging, metrics, dashboards, and monitors.
• Define and maintain service-level indicators (SLIs), service-level objectives (SLOs), and error budgets.
• Design actionable alerts that identify meaningful production problems while minimizing alert fatigue.
• Investigate performance bottlenecks, availability issues, and reliability risks across distributed systems.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve application instrumentation, troubleshooting, and production readiness.

Incident Response and Operations

• Participate in production on-call rotations and help improve incident response processes.
• Lead technical investigations and serve as incident commander during major production incidents when appropriate.
• Troubleshoot complex failures across applications, cloud infrastructure, networking, and databases.
• Conduct blameless postmortems and drive corrective actions to prevent recurring failures.
• Develop and maintain operational runbooks, escalation procedures, and recovery playbooks.

Database Reliability and Disaster Recovery

• Maintain and improve the availability, performance, and recoverability of relational databases hosted on AWS.
• Work with Amazon Aurora and RDS, including backups, restores, replication, monitoring, and failover.
• Implement and validate point-in-time recovery and database backup strategies.
• Plan and execute database migrations and infrastructure changes with minimal or no downtime.
• Contribute to disaster recovery planning, recovery testing, and high-availability architecture.
• Help establish and validate recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Engineering Collaboration

• Partner with backend, AI/ML, and security engineers to incorporate reliability into system architecture and development workflows.
• Review infrastructure and deployment changes for operational risks.
• Contribute to engineering standards for deployment safety, capacity planning, observability, and disaster recovery.
• Identify opportunities to simplify infrastructure, improve developer productivity, and reduce operational overhead.
• Mentor other engineers on infrastructure reliability, operational troubleshooting, and production engineering practices.

Required Qualifications

• Production experience: 5+ years of hands-on experience operating production systems on AWS, including responsibility for the reliability, security, and availability of business-critical applications.
• Experience at scale: Demonstrated SRE, platform engineering, or DevOps experience supporting mission-critical systems serving thousands of users or operating under similarly demanding availability and reliability requirements.
• AWS expertise: Strong experience with AWS networking, VPCs, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, SQS, Lambda, and production cloud architecture.
• Infrastructure as code: Advanced Terraform experience, including module design, state management, reusable infrastructure patterns, and safely applying changes to production environments.
• Observability: Hands-on experience designing production monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerting using Datadog or comparable observability platforms.
• Reliability engineering: Experience defining or implementing SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and actionable alerting strategies.
• Incident response: Proven experience participating in production on-call rotations, troubleshooting high-severity incidents, coordinating technical incident response, and contributing to lasting corrective actions.
• Database operations: Strong experience operating relational databases on AWS, including RDS or Aurora, backup and restore, point-in-time recovery, replication, failover, and production migrations.
• Distributed systems: Strong understanding of distributed architectures, networking, failure modes, scalability, and production performance troubleshooting.
• Deployment engineering: Experience with CI/CD, deployment automation, release safety, rollback strategies, and operational readiness.
• Automation: Proficiency in Python, Go, Bash, or another programming or scripting language used for infrastructure and operational automation.
• Ownership and collaboration: Strong technical judgment, clear communication, and demonstrated ability to independently investigate and resolve complex production problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Amazon Aurora or RDS MySQL in high-availability production environments.
• Experience designing and testing cross-region disaster recovery, automated failover, and multi-region architectures.
• Experience leading major production incidents as incident commander.
• Deep experience with Datadog APM, logging, metrics, dashboards, and monitors.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, or EKS.
• Experience operating production applications with demanding uptime, latency, throughput, or recovery requirements.
• Experience implementing blue-green deployments, canary releases, and automated rollback mechanisms.
• Experience with database performance tuning, replication issues, schema migrations, and zero-downtime deployment strategies.
• Familiarity with AWS Organizations, multi-account infrastructure, least-privilege access controls, and infrastructure security.
• Experience with performance testing, load testing, chaos engineering, or fault injection.
• Experience supporting applications in government, defense, or highly regulated environments.
• Familiarity with FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, DoD security requirements, or AWS GovCloud.
• Experience supporting real-time systems, secure communications, AI/ML workloads, or data-intensive platforms.
• Experience helping establish reliability practices, operational standards, or SRE processes across multiple engineering teams.
• Active or previously held U.S. government security clearance.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means our production systems become more reliable, observable, secure, and easier to operate.

You will help create an environment where infrastructure changes are predictable, deployments are safe, failures are detected quickly, and recovery procedures are documented and tested.

You will improve the quality of monitoring and incident response, reduce recurring operational issues, and automate manual work that slows down engineering teams.

You will work closely with developers to improve how services are designed and deployed, helping ensure reliability is built into our software rather than addressed only after problems occur.

Most importantly, you will help BluJuniper scale its products and engineering organization while maintaining the operational standards required for mission-critical systems.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for a deeply technical, pragmatic engineer who has personally operated production systems where downtime and performance failures have real consequences.

The ideal candidate has experience troubleshooting complex production issues, managing AWS infrastructure, automating deployments, improving observability, and implementing resilient database and recovery strategies.

You should be comfortable working directly in Terraform, investigating distributed application failures, reviewing database recovery procedures, and collaborating with software teams to improve production reliability.

You take ownership of problems, think proactively about failure scenarios, and know how to balance operational reliability against engineering speed.

This is not a role focused solely on responding to alerts or maintaining existing infrastructure. We want someone who will actively improve our systems, automate operational work, and help engineers deliver reliable software more effectively.

Compensation

The base salary range for this position is $160,000–$200,000 per year, depending on experience, qualifications, and other relevant factors.

Eligible employees may also receive performance bonuses and stock options in addition to base salary.

Location

This is a hybrid role based in Arlington, VA.

• Health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Performance bonus opportunities.
• Stock options.
• Flexible work environment.
• Significant technical ownership.
• Direct influence over product and architecture decisions.
• Opportunities to work across AI/ML, distributed systems, computer vision, audio, NLP, navigation, optimization, and real-time infrastructure.
• A collaborative engineering environment with direct visibility into company and product strategy.

Work Authorization and Clearance Eligibility

Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States and must be able to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance.

Certain customer, contractual, or regulatory requirements may require additional eligibility verification.

Equal Opportunity Employer

BluJuniper is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law.

Turn governance, automation, and AI into measurable outcomes, not slideware.

Large IT programs run 45% over budget and deliver 56% less value than promised. We close that gap with disciplined execution, AI-enabled governance, and ROI you can defend.