Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Position Title: Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Position Description: Protingent Staffing has an exciting Direct Hire Staff Site Reliability Engineer opportunity located in Fort Meade, MD

Job Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate large-scale cloud infrastructure and production services
• Participate in an on-call rotation supporting highly available customer-facing systems
• Lead incident response and drive post-incident reviews focused on systemic improvements
• Define, measure, and improve SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
• Improve observability through metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting
• Develop software, automation, and infrastructure using Go, Python, Terraform, and related technologies
• Eliminate operational toil through automation, tooling, and platform engineering
• Improve deployment safety through CI/CD and GitOps practices
• Build self-service platforms and operational guardrails that improve developer velocity while maintaining reliability and security
• Lead complex reliability initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, incident analysis, and knowledge sharing
• Apply AI-assisted engineering techniques to improve incident response, troubleshooting, and automation
• Support systems operating under Federal and DoD compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, IL6)

Job Qualifications:

• Proven experience with Federal and DoD compliance frameworks, specifically FedRAMP and Impact Level 6 (IL6)
• Strong experience operating large-scale production services in AWS and/or GCP
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production, including troubleshooting networking, storage, scheduling, scaling, and workload lifecycle issues
• Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm)
• Strong software engineering skills in Golang and/or Python
• Experience operating distributed data platforms such as PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, MySQL, or Cassandra
• Strong understanding of cloud networking fundamentals: DNS, load balancing, ingress, TLS, service networking, and traffic management
• Experience with observability platforms, monitoring strategies, and production telemetry
• Deep understanding of SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and capacity planning
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies
• Understanding of cloud security fundamentals, IAM, secrets management, and secure infrastructure design
• Demonstrated success leading engineering initiatives across multiple teams and mentoring engineers
• Preferred: GitOps and ArgoCD
• Preferred: Experience operating large-scale SaaS platforms and Kubernetes-based microservices
• Preferred: Experience implementing AI-assisted operational tooling or automation workflows

Job Details:

• Job Type: Direct Hire
• Location: Fort Meade, MD
• Pay Rate Range:  $184-253K
• U.S. Citizenship and TS/SCI clearance with Full Scope Polygraph required

About Protingent: Protingent is an Award-Winning provider of top-tier Engineering and IT talent, trusted by companies at the forefront of innovation — from Software and Aerospace to AI, Clean Tech, Medical Devices, and Connected Technologies. We’re passionate about making a positive impact by connecting exceptional talent with meaningful opportunities and helping our clients build the future.