Cloud SRE Systems Engineer

About the role

The Cloud Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Systems Engineer ensures reliability, availability, performance, and operational excellence of VA product environments deployed in the VA Enterprise Cloud (VAEC) for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Product Delivery Services (PDS), Benefits and Memorials (BAM), and Memorial and Benefit Services (MBS). The role delivers secure, reliable, and effective IT solutions supporting the Department’s mission by applying SRE practices, managing cloud environments, performing patching and automation, ensuring compliance with required Service Level Targets (SLTs), supporting deployments, handling incidents, and maintaining monitoring, observability, and operational documentation.

Responsibilities

• Maintain all environments in an operational state across VAEC, including application/system hardware 24x7x365.
• Apply OS and application patches and perform backup and restoration activities.
• Support software releases (often outside core hours) and validate maximum load after production deployment.
• Manage and optimize cloud resource utilization, including capacity planning and forecasting.
• Implement SRE practices and patterns to improve reliability, performance, automation, fault tolerance, telemetry, logging, and alerting across distributed and microservices architectures.
• Improve fault tolerance for distributed/microservices systems when components or resources become temporarily unavailable.
• Conduct trend analysis of system performance and resource utilization to forecast future demand and identify bottlenecks.
• Implement real-time proactive monitoring dashboards enabling visibility into system health and alerting.
• Maintain Incident Response Plans (IRPs), Disaster Recovery Plans (DRPs), backup/restore plans, and execute continuity operations.
• Produce monitoring reports, SLT assessments, postmortems, and operational dashboards.
• Communicate outages, SLT performance, and incident updates with strong documentation and reporting skills.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in computer science or IT-related field.
• 7-10 years of relevant experience.
• Knowledge of modern SRE practices: automation, resilience engineering, observability, fault tolerance, SLT/SLA adherence, and incident analysis.
• Experience with Jira and GitHub.
• Competency in maintaining IRPs, DRPs, backup/restore plans, and executing continuity operations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AWS VA Enterprise Cloud (VAEC).
• Experience with Azure DevOps.

Benefits

• Comprehensive total rewards package including paid parental leave and immediate vesting in 401(k).
• Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance.
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Short-Term and Long-Term Disability Insurance.
• Life Insurance.
• Paid Time Off & Holidays.
• Earned Bonuses & Awards.
• Professional Training Reimbursement.
• Employee Assistance Program.