Principal Site Reliability Engineer

The Principal Site Reliability Engineer will be a critical technical leader responsible for driving the operational excellence, resilience, and security of our core systems for a key Randstad client in the Washington D.C. area. This senior role merges deep expertise in infrastructure automation (IaC), CI / CD architecture, and cloud security with the foundational principles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), including defining SLOs, managing error budgets, and leading incident response. You will mentor cross-functional teams, implement cost-efficient cloud practices, and build the foundational tools and platforms that enable our developers to deliver secure, highly available, and scalable services with velocity.

Responsibilities

• Reliability Engineering & Operations : Define, implement, and maintain rigorous Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs), establish effective error budgeting, and lead incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortem processes to ensure continuous service improvement.
• Infrastructure Automation : Architect, implement, and manage secure, scalable, and repeatable cloud environments leveraging Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation.
• CI / CD Optimization & Security : Design and optimize secure, high-performance CI / CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins) incorporating advanced deployment techniques like automated rollback, canary, and blue / green strategies, and ensuring artifact validation.
• Observability & Telemetry : Develop comprehensive observability solutions, including building robust dashboards, configuring alerts, implementing synthetic checks, and maintaining telemetry pipelines (metrics, logs, traces) to ensure deep visibility into system performance, availability, and cost.
• Security & Compliance Enforcement : Integrate security tooling (SAST, DAST, SBOM, secrets scanning) directly into the deployment lifecycle and enforce security policies-as-code within deployment workflows to maintain strict compliance and a secure posture.
• Cost & Capacity Management : Implement tooling and financial practices to proactively monitor cloud cost trends, perform right-sizing of infrastructure resources, and strategically plan capacity to ensure optimal cost-to-performance ratio and high availability.
• Internal Platform Enablement : Design and build reusable internal tools, shared playbooks, and self-service platforms that significantly enhance developer productivity and enforce consistent, high-quality delivery standards across engineering teams.
• Mentorship & Technical Leadership : Serve as a senior technical mentor and subject matter expert across platform, security, and engineering teams, establishing and promoting best practices in operational readiness, fault tolerance, and secure delivery.

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

Deep expertise in a major cloud platform (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP), particularly in core services like Compute, Networking, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and monitoring.

Strong scripting and programming skills in Python, Go, or Bash for automation and tooling development.

Required Skills :

Basic Qualification :

Additional Skills :

This is a high PRIORITY requisition. This is a PROACTIVE requisition

Background Check : No

Drug Screen : No