Job description

Site Reliability Engineer/ Admin Austin, TX - Onsite role Duration: 6-12 months Note: Make sure all the skills are reflected in your recent projects. The Senior System Administrator/Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)in the VA s Enterprise Cloud is responsible for ensuring the resilience, performance, reliability, and compliance of mission-critical cloud services that support Veterans and VA stakeholders. This role bridges software engineering, systems engineering, and operations to deliver highly available, secure, and efficient cloud-based platforms aligned with VA s modernization strategy and federal compliance mandates, with a focus on reliability, performance, scalability, and automation. Though day-to-day tasks vary, depending on the various organizations and their systems, generally this role s daily work cadence follows these categories: • Proactively monitor system health, availability, and performance using observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk). • Respond to alerts and incidents, triage issues, and perform root cause analysis (RCA). • Lead on-call rotations to ensure 24/7 uptime and quick recovery from outages. • Document incident reports and contribute to postmortems to prevent recurrence. • Automate manual operational tasks such as deployments, scaling, and configuration using tools like Ansible, Terraform, or Puppet. • Manage infrastructure as code (IaC) to ensure consistency across environments. • Optimize CI/CD pipelines for reliable and repeatable software delivery. • Build self-healing systems to minimize downtime. • Conduct load and stress testing to validate system performance under peak demand. • Establish and enforce Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). • Identify and reduce sources of latency, bottlenecks, and single points of failure. • Work with development teams to design reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance into customer servers. • Patch operating systems, containers, and dependencies to address vulnerabilities. • Ensure compliance with organizational and regulatory requirements. • Implement access controls, secrets management, and least privileged principles. • Monitor resource utilization (CPU, memory, storage, network) to anticipate scaling needs. • Plan for growth by forecasting demand and preparing infrastructure accordingly. • Optimize cloud costs by rightsizing instances, using autoscaling, and leveraging reserved/spot instances. • Partner with software engineers to embed reliability practices into development. • Mentor teams on best practices for observability, automation, and incident handling. • Participate in blameless postmortems and contribute to knowledge-sharing sessions. • Continuously evaluate new tools and technologies to improve system reliability. • Design, monitor, and maintain Customer Servers to meet VA s 99.9%+ uptime and SLA requirements across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. • Implement fault-tolerant and self-healing architectures leveraging automation. • Develop and manage observability frameworks (logging, metrics, tracing) to detect, respond to, and remediate incidents quickly. • Lead blameless postmortems and drive corrective actions to strengthen VAEC resilience. • Engineer scalable automation pipelines for provisioning, patching, and compliance (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, GitHub Actions). • Reduce manual effort through self-service tools for operations teams. • Monitor and optimize application and infrastructure performance to meet demand from VA Medical Centers, Enterprise Data Warehouses, and end users. • Ensure latency, throughput, and resource utilization align with mission needs. • Integrate VA 6500, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, and Zero Trust requirements into daily operations. • Partner with cybersecurity teams to enforce continuous ATO (cATO) practices and vulnerability remediation. • Collaborate with Release Management, Engineering, and Operations teams to improve change management, deployment pipelines, and reliability practices. • Drive the adoption of SRE principles (error budgets, SLIs, SLOs, SLAs) into VA s IT Service Management (ITSM) processes. • Operate across VA s Enterprise Cloud (VAEC), on-premises data centers, and hybrid platforms, ensuring seamless integration and interoperability. • Support workloads across AWS GovCloud, Microsoft Azure Government, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) where applicable. Qualifications • Must have 5 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Systems Engineering. • Strong experience with Linux/Unix systems administration and troubleshooting. • Proficient with cloud platforms (AWS and/or Azure), especially in deploying production workloads. • Deep understanding of monitoring, metrics, alerting, and observability. • Proficient in designing, implementing, and managing automation solutions using Ansible. • Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps). • Hands-on with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, AKS). • Familiarity with networking concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, VPCs, load balancing). • Solid understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and Agile methodologies. • Comfortable participating in on-call rotations and handling high-priority incidents. • Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills. • Ability to work in cross-functional teams and communicate effectively with developers, operations, and leadership. • A strong bias for automation and self-healing systems. • Ownership mindset with a commitment to reliability and continuous improvement. Preferred Qualifications: • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer. • Linux Certified: Azure Administrator or DevOps Engineer Expert. • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). • Experience in chaos engineering, capacity modeling, or SRE tooling. Education: • Bachelor s degree in computer science, electronics engineering or related technical discipline and 5+ years work experience. • Eight (8) years of additional relevant experience may be substituted for education (13 years total). Sateesh

Requirements