Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Job Summary:

The Lead Site Reliability Engineer ensures our cloud-native ecommerce platform is reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient, and that it performs at its peak capability at all times. This hands-on technical leader supervises our cloud administrators and platform engineers and sets direction across Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure and configuration as code, observability, cloud hygiene, FinOps, and our growing AI platform. The Lead Site Reliability Engineer partners with development teams to define service level objectives, conduct production readiness reviews, manage releases, and troubleshoot complex issues, and uses AI to accelerate coding, research, and automation. This role interacts with functional areas across all levels of the organization.

Key Responsibilities:

• Supervise, mentor, and develop a team of cloud administrators and platform engineers. Set priorities, lead daily standups, and ensure work and ticket queues are balanced and resolved in a timely manner.
• Lead incident response and troubleshooting across the stack, act as an escalation point, and run blameless post-incident reviews that drive short-term and long-term fixes and eliminate repeat occurrences. Continuously assess system risks and improve internal processes and controls to prevent downtime.
• Own release management, ensuring scheduled changes go out as planned through automated, low-risk rollouts and fast, reliable rollback. Participate in early AM deployment calls as needed.
• Partner with development teams to define service level objectives (SLOs), service level indicators (SLIs), and error budgets, and conduct production readiness reviews to ensure new and changed services meet standards for reliability, scalability, security, observability, and supportability before launch.
• Design, build, and operate large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant cloud-native systems on Kubernetes across public cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, or GCP, including capacity planning, load testing, and performance tuning to keep systems ahead of demand.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows (e.g., Azure DevOps), and manage infrastructure and configuration as code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) to deliver consistent, repeatable, self-service environments and to detect and correct configuration drift.
• Establish and mature observability, including metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and actionable alerting, to measure availability, latency, and overall system health. Provide routine reporting to senior management on reliability, SLO attainment, incidents, cloud spend, ticket trends, and project status.
• Drive FinOps and cloud hygiene practices in partnership with engineering and finance, including cost visibility, tagging and allocation, rightsizing, resource lifecycle management, patching, decommissioning of unused resources, and governance guardrails.
• Help build and run our AI platform, and operate and secure API and AI gateways, providing engineering teams with reliable, governed, and cost-aware access to AI models and services, including traffic management, authentication, rate limiting, and usage visibility.
• Automate operational tasks and eliminate toil using Bash, Python, and AI tools for coding, research, and automation, and champion the responsible use of AI across the team to accelerate delivery.

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a similar area. Relevant experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Minimum of four (4) years of experience in site reliability engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or Linux systems administration.
• Hands-on experience running production workloads on Kubernetes and at least one major public cloud provider (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
• Strong experience with infrastructure as code and configuration management (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and GitOps-based delivery (e.g., Azure DevOps).
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using Bash and Python.
• Experience implementing observability (metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting) and defining SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals, high availability, load balancing, and API gateways.
• Practical experience using AI tools to accelerate coding, research, and automation.

Preferred Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Experience leading, mentoring, or supervising engineers.
• QSR experience.
• Experience building or operating an AI platform, including AI gateways, model access, and governance of AI usage.
• Understanding of FinOps principles and cloud cost management.
• Experience across more than one public cloud provider.
• Experience hosting .NET or .NET Core applications.
• Relevant certifications, such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, or FinOps Certified Practitioner.

Working Conditions:

• This is a full-time position that provides Level 2 and 3 support, on a 24/7 schedule, for all operational and outage issues relating to the infrastructure.
• Ability to participate in an on-call rotation performing weekend, early AM, and after-hours support.
• While performing the duties of this job, the colleague is required, on a regular basis, to talk and hear. The colleague is required to respond to numerous phone calls and inquiries.
• This position can be performed remotely but may require occasional trips to the office for team events, vendor meetings, or as needed.

Competencies:

• Willingness to document technical processes and share knowledge with others. Capable of following and composing process and procedure documentation, as well as training other users on complex topics.
• Ability to interact with colleagues from all levels of the organization, both technical and non-technical, and communicate technical ideas effectively.
• Proven ability to work independently with minimal supervision.
• Drive to deliver an “extra 9” of availability.
• Ability to learn new technologies or support existing applications quickly and with minimal guidance.
• Thrives on technical challenges and takes pride in solving them.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and with doing things differently.

Disclaimer:

The above is intended to describe the general content of and requirements for the performance of this job.  It is not to be construed as an exhaustive statement of duties, responsibilities, or requirements.

All items listed above are illustrative and not comprehensive.  They are not contractual in nature and are subject to change at the discretion of Little Caesars Enterprises Inc.      

Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc. is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to that individual’s race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, ethnicity, citizenship, or any other characteristic protected by law.                                   
The Company will strive to provide reasonable accommodations to permit qualified applicants who have a need for an accommodation to participate in the hiring process (e.g., accommodations for a job interview) if so requested.  
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