Site Reliability Engineer

Job Summary
The Site Reliability Engineer will design, implement, and support reliable, secure, scalable, and highly available technology solutions across cloud, edge, networking, and device environments. The role requires strong hands-on expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, site reliability engineering, observability and monitoring, automation, and scripting. The engineer will define and operate against SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, build meaningful observability and automation solutions, support incident response, and drive permanent improvements across restaurant technology systems. This is a hybrid contract position based in Louisville, KY, with onsite work required Tuesday and Thursday.

Key Responsibilities
• Define and own Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and use error budgets to balance reliability with delivery velocity.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability platforms that provide meaningful operational signals.
• Lead blameless post-incident reviews, drive root cause analysis, and ensure permanent corrective actions are implemented.
• Proactively identify reliability risks across the technology stack before they become incidents.
• Establish and track reliability metrics and report system health to engineering leadership.
• Design and implement scalable, secure, and highly available cloud architectures primarily on AWS, with working knowledge of Azure.
• Architect and manage containerized workloads using Kubernetes, including EKS, AKS, and edge Kubernetes deployments.
• Design and implement serverless and container-based solutions using AWS Fargate and other managed services.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform.
• Own architecture across the cloud, edge, networking, and device management layers.
• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI/CD and modern DevOps practices.
• Build internal tools, automation, and middleware integrations to eliminate repetitive operational work.
• Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate scripting, troubleshooting, and documentation.
• Design and support Kubernetes-based edge systems deployed across restaurant locations.
• Support mobile application deployments and troubleshoot deployment issues across restaurant endpoints.
• Manage and optimize Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms supporting the restaurant device fleet.
• Configure and troubleshoot enterprise networking, including switches and restaurant-facing network infrastructure.
• Lead and participate in incident response, including on-call coverage and post-incident reviews.
• Reduce Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) through improved tooling, runbooks, and automation.
• Establish and enforce cloud governance, security policies, and architectural standards.
• Implement cloud security best practices, including IAM strategy, network segmentation, encryption, and secrets management.
• Conduct security architecture reviews and identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps.
• Integrate security into CI/CD pipelines through DevSecOps practices, automated scanning, policy validation, and vulnerability management.
• Collaborate with engineering, DevOps, and security teams to ensure secure-by-design solutions across cloud and restaurant technology environments.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams.
• Create and maintain documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records.
• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and recommend improvements.

Required Qualifications
• 6+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, with 3+ years focused on site reliability engineering, cloud architecture, or platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services including VPC, EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, IAM, RDS, and S3.
• Working experience with Microsoft Azure.
• Strong expertise in Kubernetes and container orchestration, including edge or distributed deployments.
• Experience with GitLab CI/CD and CI/CD pipeline design.
• Strong experience with Terraform for infrastructure provisioning.
• Experience with enterprise networking, including switch configuration, VLANs, and network troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms.
• Experience with automation and scripting using Python, Bash, Go, or equivalent technologies.
• Proven ability to build internal tooling and API integrations rather than only configuring managed services.
• Experience defining and operating against SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Comfortable working in Linux command-line environments; Windows familiarity is a plus for environments requiring Windows-based restaurant endpoints.
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and reliability engineering practices.
• Strong problem-solving, analytical, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Ability to balance strategic architecture with hands-on engineering execution.

Preferred Qualifications
• Experience designing serverless architectures using AWS Lambda, Fargate, API Gateway, or EventBridge.
• Experience with DevSecOps tooling, including SAST, DAST, container scanning, and Infrastructure as Code scanning.
• Familiarity with security frameworks such as CIS, NIST, ISO 27001, or SOC 2.
• AWS and/or Azure certifications.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, or SIEM solutions.
• Background in restaurant, retail, or distributed edge technology environments.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools for scripting, troubleshooting, and documentation.