Principal SRE

Job Title: Principal SRE
Duration: 12 Months with possibility to extend or convert
Location: Charlotte, NC/Irving, TX/Phoenix, AZ/Minneapolis, MN/Iselin, NJ/San Francisco, CA – Hybrid Role (3 days onsite every week)

Objective: Improve scalability & reliability of existing systems. Drive retroactive mitigation of technical debt for critical systems

Skills and focus of PREs:
Observability

• Alerts & Dashboards focused on user experience
• Focus: Metrics, Logs, Traces

Capacity

• Continuous Trend & Usage analysis
• Thresholds for new equipment purchases with lead time

Performance

• Measure performance from user perspective
• Focus: Response time, Error rate, Latency

Resiliency

• High Availability & Fault Tolerance (within & across DC)
• Focus: RTO should match business expectations

In this role, you will:

• Act as a Platform Reliability Engineering (PRE) expert, providing deep technical leadership in one core domain (Database, Cloud, Network, Compute/Storage, Middleware, or Application Support), while partnering across broader platform teams.
• Lead analysis and remediation of systemic reliability issues and complex production problems, translating recurring incidents into long-term engineering solutions.
• Design, influence, and implement scalable, highly reliable systems using SRE principles including SLI/SLOs, error budgets, and automation-first approaches.
• Drive observability standards across platforms, with a strong focus on metrics, logs, traces, and user-experience-based alerting and dashboards.
• Partner with application, infrastructure, cloud, and support teams to improve availability, performance, capacity, and resiliency of both new and existing systems.
• Lead or contribute to blameless post-mortems, ensuring actionable outcomes and sustained reduction of repeat incidents.
• Translate advanced technical knowledge and enterprise context into clear guidance for senior leadership on reliability risks, priorities, and investment areas.
• Mentor and guide engineers and support staff on reliability best practices, operational standards, and automation opportunities.

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in Systems Operations, SRE, Platform Engineering, or Production Support, with deep expertise in at least one of the following domains:
  • Database platforms
  • Cloud platforms
  • Network infrastructure
  • Compute / Storage platforms
  • Middleware platforms
  • Enterprise Application Support
• Strong hands-on experience applying SRE concepts such as SLI/SLO definition, error budgets, reliability metrics, and incident-driven engineering improvements.
• Proven experience diagnosing and resolving complex, large-scale production issues across distributed systems.
• Solid understanding of observability tools and practices covering monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing.
• Experience driving automation and self-service to reduce operational toil and manual interventions.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence engineers, partners, and senior leaders.

Desired Qualifications:

• Exposure to capacity management, performance engineering, and resiliency design (HA, fault tolerance, RTO/RPO).
• Experience working in environments with hybrid platforms (on-prem + cloud) and complex enterprise dependencies.
• Ability to drive technical debt remediation for critical legacy systems using structured, prioritized backlogs.
• Familiarity with IT service management, incident/problem management, and continuous improvement frameworks.
• Experience mentoring or leading senior engineers in reliability or operations-focused roles.

Job Expectations:

• Strong collaboration and partnering skills across platform, application, and support teams.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced, high-impact production environment.
• Consistent delivery of high-quality reliability outcomes within expected timelines.
• High attention to detail, data-driven problem-solving, and operational rigor.
• Prior project or initiative leadership experience is highly desirable.