Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) – Java, Kafka, Node.js & AI Awareness

QData Inc is seeking a Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to drive reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence across their cloud-native platforms. The ideal candidate will manage and support mission-critical applications, define and monitor service level indicators, and build automation for incident management and operational workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Lead SRE initiatives focused on system reliability, availability, scalability, and performance
• Manage and support mission-critical Java, Kafka, and Node.js applications in production environments
• Define and monitor SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
• Build automation for incident management, deployments, remediation, and operational workflows
• Drive root cause analysis (RCA) and implement preventive measures
• Design and implement observability solutions including metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting
• Collaborate with development, DevOps, cloud, and security teams to improve platform resilience
• Support Kafka clusters, event-streaming infrastructure, and distributed systems
• Lead production readiness reviews and capacity planning exercises
• Participate in on-call rotations and major incident management activities

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Support, DevOps, or Platform Engineering
• Strong experience supporting Java/Spring Boot applications in production
• Hands-on experience with Node.js applications and microservices
• Deep knowledge of Apache Kafka administration, monitoring, troubleshooting, and performance tuning
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration
• Strong cloud experience in AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps
• Strong Linux and scripting skills (Python, Bash, Shell)
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, ELK Stack, Dynatrace, New Relic
• Understanding of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Experience leveraging AI-powered monitoring and incident management tools
• Knowledge of AIOps platforms for anomaly detection and predictive alerting
• Familiarity with tools such as OpenAI APIs, GitHub Copilot, and AI-assisted operational workflows
• Ability to identify automation opportunities using AI technologies
• Experience in high-volume distributed systems and event-driven architectures
• Strong troubleshooting skills across application, infrastructure, network, and database layers
• Experience supporting large-scale Kafka environments
• Exposure to ServiceNow, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or similar incident management platforms
• Financial Services, Banking, Retail, Healthcare, or SaaS industry experience