Sr. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead

This position is not eligible for visa transfer or sponsorship now or at any time in the future.

About the role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead, you will make an impact by ensuring the stability, resiliency, and performance of mission-critical enterprise applications across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. You will be a valued member of the Site Reliability Engineering team and work collaboratively with application development, infrastructure, security, operations, vendor partners, and global support teams to drive operational excellence and continuous reliability improvements.

Responsibilities

• Drive application reliability and availability across hybrid infrastructure environments, proactively identifying risks and implementing preventive measures before they impact business operations.
• Lead complex incident management efforts, rapidly diagnosing and resolving issues across application, middleware, database, network, and cloud technology stacks to minimize disruption and reduce recovery times.
• Assess production risk associated with infrastructure, operating system, security, middleware, and platform changes, ensuring safe and successful deployments.
• Conduct comprehensive root cause analyses, identifying underlying issues and driving long-term corrective actions that improve system stability and prevent recurrence.
• Build and enhance observability capabilities using Splunk and related monitoring tools to detect anomalies, correlate events, and accelerate issue resolution.
• Automate operational processes using Python, Shell scripting, and Ansible to improve efficiency, consistency, and operational resilience.
• Plan and execute resiliency and disaster recovery exercises to validate failover capabilities, recovery procedures, and operational readiness.
• Partner with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and offshore support organizations to maintain service levels, manage escalations, and drive continuous improvement initiatives.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, production support, systems engineering, or application support for large-scale distributed enterprise environments.
• Strong expertise administering and troubleshooting Java-based application platforms, including WebSphere Application Server (WAS), Apache Tomcat, and related middleware technologies.
• Hands-on experience diagnosing JVM performance issues using heap dumps, thread dumps, garbage collection analysis, and memory tuning techniques.
• Proven experience supporting enterprise applications in AWS environments, including EC2, Application Load Balancers, networking, and security constructs.
• Strong understanding of networking concepts, including TCP/IP, SSL/TLS, load balancing, firewall interactions, and timeout management.
• Experience troubleshooting database connectivity and performance issues involving IBM DB2, Oracle, JDBC drivers, and connection pooling technologies.
• Proficiency with observability and monitoring platforms, particularly Splunk, for log analysis, event correlation, and root cause investigation.
• Strong automation and scripting skills using Python and Shell scripting, with experience implementing infrastructure automation and configuration management solutions such as Ansible.

Skills

These will help you stand out:

• Experience supporting IBM HTTP Server (IHS), F5 BIG-IP LTM, AWS ALB, and enterprise traffic management solutions.
• Knowledge of IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, and other messaging and middleware technologies.
• Experience managing TLS/SSL certificates, trust stores, certificate renewals, and enterprise certificate authority migrations.
• Familiarity with Linux, AIX, Solaris, and Windows Server administration in enterprise environments.
• Experience with ServiceNow, SailPoint, application inventory tools, and enterprise change management processes.
• Demonstrated ability to lead major incident response efforts, coordinate cross-functional teams, and communicate effectively with business and technology stakeholders.

Schedule

This is a hybrid position requiring associates to work from a client or Cognizant office in Bridgewater, NJ as determined by business needs.

Pay

The annual salary for this position is between $63,000 to $99,500 depending on experience and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This position is also eligible for Cognizant’s discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant’s applicable plans.

Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance
• Paid holidays plus Paid Time Off
• 401(k) plan and contributions
• Long-term/Short-term Disability
• Paid Parental Leave
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan