Site Reliability Engineer

About Us

We are Skyward—a people-centered business with a desire to serve others through information technology. We are diverse and unified; creative and collaborative; a collection of complementary talents driven by a civic tech mission. Our values define us:

• Integrity: We’re conscientious, intentional, and empathetic. Our words and actions align.
• Compassionate: We care deeply for each other, our clients, and our work.
• Inquisitive: We remain students by failing openly and turning lessons into solutions.
• Unconventional: Work happens inside of life, and our culture erases the line dividing the two.
• Authentic: We’re relaxed and fun yet intensely curious and driven.

Team members are placed with thought, care, and precision to ensure Trust, Truth, and Transparency represent our brand.

About the Role

We need an SRE who has a real feel for how distributed systems behave and a knack for tracking down complex issues. If you love keeping systems healthy, fast, and quietly reliable, join us in supporting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as it merges and modernizes its enterprise knowledge and data systems into a single, AI-driven platform. This role is perfect for someone motivated to learn, grow, and be part of a future-looking team.

Responsibilities

• Operate and tune AWS environments to meet infrastructure and application availability SLAs, even during transition and change.
• Implement continuous monitoring, alerting, and dashboards using tools like AWS CloudWatch, New Relic, and Splunk, and establish performance baselines to spot degradation before users do.
• Automate toil by writing infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible) and supporting CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins) and containerized workloads (Docker) for repeatable, reliable deployments.
• Define and track SLIs and SLOs, and produce performance, load/stress, and bottleneck reports to drive smarter decisions.
• Optimize for performance, security, and cost using tools like AWS Trusted Advisor.
• Support security and compliance modernization by partnering with the Security & Compliance SME to review vulnerability scans, feed continuous monitoring, and advance the move toward a Continuous ATO (cATO) within a FISMA Moderate boundary (RMF, ARS, IS2P2).
• Strengthen resilience by helping design and maintain disaster recovery and COOP continuity.
• Own incidents end-to-end: drive response, run blameless post-mortems, and implement preventative fixes.

Requirements

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field (or equivalent hands-on experience).
• 3–5 years of experience in site reliability, systems, or cloud engineering, with meaningful time spent in AWS environments.
• Solid working knowledge of core AWS services, architecture, and best practices.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation).
• A good understanding of CI/CD pipelines and automation tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar).
• Comfort scripting and automating in Python.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tooling (CloudWatch, New Relic, Splunk, or comparable).
• Strong problem-solving instincts and the composure to work calmly under pressure.
• Clear communication skills, with the ability to make complex technical concepts understandable.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with CMS.
• Experience in AI, NLP, or LLM-driven environments.
• AWS certifications and real-world experience.

Even if you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications, we encourage you to apply. We’re focused on hiring individuals with the right skills and passion to grow.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 15 days of paid leave + 7 days of sick leave + 11 paid Federal holidays.
• 2 days bereavement leave + up to 40 hours for jury duty.
• 401K with 4% employer contribution (no vesting period).
• Up to 4 weeks of paid paternity and maternity leave.
• Company-provided laptop.
• $5,000 per year for professional development.
• $600 per year for technical supplies and equipment.
• $2,000 referral bonus.
• Life and disability insurance + HSA and FSA.
• Legal Shield and ID Shield Voluntary Benefits.

Pay

We believe great work deserves great pay. Compensation is competitive, fair, and transparent, matching your skills, experience, and the value you bring.

Schedule

We support flexible working hours and remote opportunities to help maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Offers of employment are contingent upon acceptable results of a background investigation. Applicants must have the ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust security clearance due to the nature of our work as a government contractor.