Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Job Title: Principal Site Reliability Engineer (Principal SRE)

Experience:

Location:

Employment Type:

About the Role

Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

As a Principal SRE, you will champion reliability engineering best practices, lead high-impact initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and drive long-term improvements in system availability, performance, and resilience.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Reliability Engineering

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across

  reliability, availability, scalability, and performance engineering

  initiatives.
• Define and evolve

  SRE best practices

  , standards, and operational playbooks.
• Lead initiatives to improve

  system reliability, uptime, latency, and efficiency

  across platforms.
• Guide architectural decisions to ensure systems are resilient, observable, and fault-tolerant.

Operational Excellence

• Champion

  operational excellence

  by driving improvements in monitoring, alerting, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Establish and track

  SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets

  to balance reliability with feature delivery.
• Lead

  incident management, root cause analysis (RCA)

  , and post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence.
• Drive automation initiatives to reduce toil and improve operational efficiency.

Leadership & People Development

• Provide mentorship, coaching, and career guidance to

  SRE Engineers and Senior SRE Engineers

  .
• Foster a culture of accountability, learning, and engineering excellence.
• Partner with engineering managers to support team growth, performance, and succession planning.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Act as a

  diplomatic liaison

  between the SRE organization and application engineering, platform, security, and product teams.
• Align reliability goals with broader organizational priorities and business outcomes.
• Influence stakeholders through strong communication, data-driven insights, and technical credibility.

Risk Management & Crisis Response

• Lead

  risk assessment

  and proactive identification of reliability and operational risks.
• Own crisis management during high-severity incidents, ensuring calm, structured, and effective response.
• Drive preventative strategies through chaos engineering, resilience testing, and failure simulations.

Strategy & Long-Term Planning

• Apply

  strategic thinking

  to define long-term reliability roadmaps and operational improvements.
• Partner with leadership to align SRE investments with long-term platform and business goals.
• Continuously evaluate tools, technologies, and processes to support scalable growth.

Required Skills & Qualifications

Experience

• 7+ years

  of professional experience in

  Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Platform Engineering

  , or related roles.
• Proven experience leading large-scale, distributed systems in production environments.

Technical Expertise

• Exceptional technical proficiency within

  modern cloud-native and enterprise technology stacks

  .
• Strong knowledge of system design, observability, incident management, and automation.
• Experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, and reliability tooling.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and operational workflows.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Strong

  leadership and people management

  skills.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and stakeholder management abilities.
• Proven ability to influence without authority and drive cross-team alignment.
• Adept at

  risk assessment, decision-making, and crisis management

  under pressure.

Project & Program Management

• Advanced project and initiative management capabilities.
• Ability to lead multiple high-impact initiatives in parallel while maintaining operational stability.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Experience implementing SRE practices at enterprise scale.
• Familiarity with compliance, security, and governance requirements in large organizations.
• Experience driving cultural transformation toward reliability-first engineering.