Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

You will be responsible for leading site reliability engineering efforts focusing on infrastructure performance, scaling, and optimization, observability, incident management, zero-downtime deployments, rollback reliability, secret management, IAM risk mitigation, configuration drift, environment parity, and application-level performance and engineering quality. Key Responsibilities: - Take ownership of end-to-end system reliability, including cloud resource planning and code-level instrumentation. - Review and enhance backend code for performance, resiliency, and observability, such as retries, timeouts, connection pools, and logging. - Architect and scale multi-environment Kubernetes deployments, with a preference for GKE, to ensure high availability and low drift. - Define and implement zero-downtime deployment strategies like canary, blue-green, and progressive delivery. - Collaborate with full stack teams to ensure release readiness, CI/CD quality gates, and infra-aware feature rollout. - Strengthen secret management, IAM policies, and privilege boundaries for applications and services. - Lead incident responses, root cause analysis, and long-term reliability enhancements. - Develop and review Terraform modules, Helm charts, or platform tooling using bash, Python, or Go as necessary. - Lead design reviews and make cross-functional decisions that impact both product and platform reliability. Requirements: - 6+ years of experience in full stack development, SRE, or platform engineering. - Proficiency in one or more backend stacks like Python/Django, Node/NestJS, Go, or Java/Spring, with the ability to review or contribute code. - Strong expertise in Kubernetes, preferably GKE, and Helm for optimizing, securing, and debugging real-world workloads. - Proficient in Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflows, ideally with Terraform Cloud and remote state strategy. - Solid understanding of GCP or similar cloud provider services such as IAM, VPCs, CloudSQL, networking, Secret Manager, and monitoring. - Experience implementing progressive delivery practices like ArgoCD, Flux, GitOps, and CI/CD patterns. - Proven ability to enhance system observability using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry. - Capability to deep dive into application repositories, identify architectural flaws or infrastructure misuse, and provide solutions or guidance. - Experience in remaining calm under pressure, incident management, and fostering a postmortem culture. Tools and Expectations: - Datadog: Monitor infrastructure health, capture service-level metrics, and reduce alert fatigue through high signal thresholds. - PagerDuty: Manage the incident management pipeline, route alerts based on severity, and align with business SLAs. - GKE / Kubernetes: Enhance cluster stability, workload isolation, define auto-scaling configurations, and tune for efficiency. - Helm / GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux): Validate release consistency across clusters, monitor sync status, and ensure rollout safety. - Terraform Cloud: Support disaster recovery planning and detect infrastructure changes through state comparisons. - CloudSQL / Cloudflare: Diagnose database and networking issues, monitor latency, enforce access patterns, and validate WAF usage. - Secret Management & IAM: Ensure secure handling of secrets, manage time-privileged credentials, and define alerts for abnormal usage.,