Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Empower is dedicated to transforming financial lives by providing a flexible work environment and promoting internal mobility. The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will lead reliability initiatives, architect solutions for operational challenges, mentor engineers, and establish best practices to ensure high reliability for critical financial services infrastructure.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement highly available, fault-tolerant systems supporting critical financial transactions
• Architect infrastructure solutions using AWS best practices, optimizing for cost, performance, and reliability
• Lead complex incident response efforts, coordinating across teams to restore service rapidly
• Drive postmortem processes for high-severity incidents, ensuring action items are identified and completed
• Establish and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for key services
• Design and implement disaster recovery strategies and business continuity plans
• Build advanced Infrastructure as Code solutions using Terraform, including modules, workspaces, and state management
• Architect and optimize multi-cluster EKS environments, including pod autoscaling, cluster autoscaling, and resource optimization
• Design observability strategies using Datadog and Splunk, including metrics, dashboards, and alerting that support proactive detection
• Implement progressive delivery mechanisms (canary and blue-green deployments) within GitOps workflows
• Build automation frameworks that reduce operational toil and improve team efficiency
• Partner with development teams to improve application reliability, including design reviews and architectural guidance
• Mentor junior and intermediate SREs through coaching and code reviews
• Contribute to architectural decisions that impact platform reliability and scalability
• Evangelize SRE best practices across the engineering organization
• Participate in on-call rotations and drive improvements to reduce on-call burden
• Implement and maintain zero-trust security controls across infrastructure
• Ensure systems meet financial services regulatory requirements and internal compliance standards
• Conduct security reviews of infrastructure changes and deployment processes
• Participate in audit preparations and respond to compliance-related inquiries

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or similar emphasis, or equivalent experience
• 4 to 7 years of Site Reliability Engineering experience (or equivalent), with a track record operating large-scale production systems
• Deep, hands-on expertise in AWS across a broad range of services and architectural patterns
• Advanced Kubernetes knowledge, including custom resources, operators, and cluster federation concepts
• Expert proficiency in Terraform, including module development, state management, and complex workflow orchestration
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or Go, with ability to develop production-quality tools and services
• Production experience implementing observability at scale using Datadog, Splunk, or similar platforms
• Demonstrated experience establishing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines at enterprise scale
• Deep understanding of GitOps principles and experience with tools such as ArgoCD or Flux
• Proven ability to lead complex incident response and conduct thorough postmortems
• Strong understanding of networking, security, and infrastructure design patterns
• Experience mentoring engineers and conducting technical training
• Experience in financial services or the payments industry
• Deep knowledge of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, PCI DSS, FINRA)
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional)
• CKA and/or CKAD certifications
• Experience with service mesh implementations (Istio, Linkerd, Consul)
• Background in chaos engineering and fault injection testing
• Experience with FinOps and cloud cost optimization
• Contributions to open-source projects in the SRE/DevOps space
• Experience implementing Operational Excellence strategies