Sr. Site Reliability Engineer — Chicago, IL

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Location: Chicago, IL

Employment Type: Full-Time

Work Arrangement: Hybrid

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help improve the reliability, scalability, resilience, and operational performance of critical production services.

This individual will apply software engineering, systems engineering, automation, and DevOps principles to ensure that reliability, observability, performance, and operational readiness are incorporated throughout the software development lifecycle.

The Senior SRE will work closely with Software Engineering and cross-functional technology teams to identify systemic reliability risks, improve production environments, and drive technical solutions that support highly available and scalable systems.

This role requires the ability to independently lead reliability initiatives, influence engineering decisions, and take ownership of broader service reliability outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Apply software engineering, automation, and DevOps principles to continuously improve how services are developed, tested, deployed, monitored, operated, and recovered.

• Use data, experimentation, and technical analysis to identify reliability risks, validate assumptions, and guide engineering decisions.

• Define, implement, and improve Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and other service-health metrics.

• Enhance observability through monitoring, logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, dashboards, and service-health instrumentation.

• Drive continuous improvements across CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automation, testing, deployment practices, incident response, capacity management, and system resilience.

• Identify recurring production issues and translate operational findings into improvements in application code, architecture, tooling, automation, and engineering practices.

• Partner with Software Engineering teams to integrate reliability, scalability, performance, observability, recoverability, and operational readiness throughout the development lifecycle.

• Participate in and lead incident response, troubleshooting, service restoration, and post-incident reviews.

• Participate in an on-call rotation for supported production services.

• Improve on-call effectiveness through automation, monitoring, runbooks, incident analysis, and the elimination of recurring operational issues.

• Reduce manual processes and operational overhead through reusable automation, tooling, and improved engineering practices.

Minimum Qualifications

• Typically 5–8 years of relevant professional experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Cloud/Platform Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

• Experience with software development or scripting using one or more modern programming languages.

• Strong understanding of software engineering principles, distributed systems, production troubleshooting, automation, and observability.

• Experience working with public cloud technologies and architectures, preferably AWS.

• Knowledge of infrastructure, networking, Linux/Unix environments, and modern application architectures.

• Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with AWS or another major cloud platform such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

• Experience developing, deploying, operating, or improving highly available production software and distributed systems.

• Familiarity with CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containers, orchestration platforms, monitoring, alerting, observability, and software delivery automation.

• Experience with SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, incident management, performance analysis, capacity management, resilience testing, disaster recovery, or operational readiness.

• Experience developing reusable automation, tooling, platforms, and engineering practices that improve operational efficiency.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Compensation: $106,000 – $130,000