Staff SRE

Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Technical Lead) - Platform Engineering

Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid)

Overview

A leading technology organization is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to provide technical leadership across a global Platform Engineering environment. In this role you will drive cloud modernization, reliability engineering, platform automation, and AI-enabled operational excellence while serving as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the technical roadmap for platform reliability, cloud infrastructure, and automation.
• Lead enterprise-scale cloud migration and modernization initiatives, with a focus on Google Cloud Platform.
• Serve as the technical authority for large-scale infrastructure and platform architecture decisions.
• Drive adoption of AI and agentic technologies to improve automation, incident response, and operational efficiency.
• Establish reliability standards including SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Mentor engineers and provide architectural guidance across multiple teams.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, GitOps, and cloud-native best practices.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, Systems Engineering, or Software Engineering.
• Experience as a Technical Lead, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or recognized SME.
• Expert-level Python development experience, including automation and distributed systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Kubernetes.
• Proven success leading cloud migration, platform transformation, or large-scale engineering initiatives.
• Experience leveraging Generative AI and agentic tools to improve engineering productivity and operational workflows.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, observability, and high-availability architectures.
• Experience with Terraform, CI/CD, and modern platform engineering practices.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence technical and business stakeholders.

Preferred

• Experience supporting globally distributed, mission-critical platforms at enterprise scale.
• Expertise with Kafka or large-scale event-driven architectures.
• Cloud and Kubernetes certifications.
• Background in highly regulated, high-availability, or performance-sensitive environments.

This is a hybrid role based out of the firms Chicago office requiring 2 days of onsite work per week. At this time the team is unable to provide visa sponsorship.

Operating as part of Phaidon International, Selby Jennings is a multi-award winning global recruitment organization focused on servicing the financial industry.

By breaking down financial markets into individual niches and micro-specialisms, Selby Jennings powers a knowledge-led model, delivering global solutions into local markets. Every consultant is an expert in their field. Structuring our teams to mirror the demands of our clients and candidates, we identify, qualify and present the highest caliber candidates, as well as identifying the best market opportunities for leading finance professionals.

We work in partnership with clients to tailor-make a suitable search model based on the type of assignment and client service level requirements, adopting a bespoke combination of solutions to ensure optimum reach into the active and passive market places.

From our offices around the world, we recruit beyond international boundaries, pro-actively sourcing the best talent in the industry. Across contingent, retained, and project solutions, our service is unrivaled; speaking to our level of service provision, search accuracy, and flexibility.