Lead Site Reliability Engineer

About the role

CardWorks Financial Group is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our growing team. This role will be instrumental in establishing and maturing our SRE practice, focusing on improving service reliability, scalability, and uptime.

Responsibilities

• Establish the SRE operating model and ensure adoption across teams.
• Identify, pilot, and operationalize AI-enabled reliability use cases.
• Define and operationalize reliability metrics, including SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Own the centralized SRE service engagement model, including service tiers, onboarding criteria, and reliability standards.
• Design the on-call and escalation model for a centralized SRE team.
• Develop automation and observability solutions to reduce operational toil and enhance system visibility.
• Participate in incident and problem management, including serving as incident coordinator for high-severity events.
• Manage operational readiness and performance, including capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production readiness reviews.
• Collaborate with security, risk, and compliance teams to align reliability goals with governance and compliance requirements.
• Champion reliability as a core product feature, promoting continuous improvement and communicating key metrics to stakeholders.
• Evaluate AI tools for reliability with security/privacy/compliance guardrails and measure their impact.
• Participate in on-call rotations and provide operational support for SRE-supported systems and products.

Qualifications

• Experience in Site Reliability Engineering with a track record of measurable improvements in uptime, scalability, release stability, and overall reliability.
• Hands-on experience applying AI/ML to operations (AIOps) or GenAI in production support workflows.
• Proven ability to establish Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) in production environments.
• Strong observability and telemetry expertise in designing instrumentation, building actionable dashboards and alerts, and delivering proactive reliability insights.
• Infrastructure engineering experience with strong Infrastructure as Code skills using tools like Terraform and Ansible.
• Practical knowledge of CI/CD pipeline design, optimization, and troubleshooting using modern tooling and platforms like Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab CI.
• Thorough understanding and practical experience in containerization and platform modernization, including architecting and operating containerized workloads with Docker, VMware, and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of emerging reliability practices, including SLO automation platforms, AIOps, or predictive operations.

Preferred Certifications

• AWS Professional
• Terraform
• Ansible
• Azure DevOps
• Octopus Deploy

Summary of Qualifications

The ideal candidate will have a Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, or equivalent practical experience, along with 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering. They should have a proven track record of delivering measurable improvements in reliability and a strong background in production incident response, leading resolution efforts, and conducting blameless post-incident reviews.

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) plan with company match, short- and long-term disability insurance, wellness programs, group life and AD&D insurance, paid vacation, sick days, and holidays. Our Employee Value Proposition includes competitive pay, a bonus target or variable pay incentive program, and opportunities for professional growth and development.

Pay and Schedule

The salary range for this position, if located in NY Metro/NY State, is $146,032 to $162,257. However, the salary range may vary for other geographic areas. We offer a hybrid work model or fully remote model based on hiring manager decision and priorities of the role.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity/expression, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.