SDM SRE Staff Engineer

Job Description – SRE Staff Tech Ops Lead 

Job Title 

SRE Tech Ops Lead 

Role Summary 

The SRE Tech Ops Lead  is responsible for defining, implementing, and governing the enterprise-wide Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) strategy, architecture, standards, and operating model. This role ensures that reliability, availability, scalability, observability, resiliency, and operational excellence are embedded across the software delivery lifecycle and production ecosystem. 

The SRE Architect will work closely with product, engineering, operations, cloud, infrastructure, and leadership teams to establish reliability standards, modernize operational practices, drive automation, and enable measurable service health improvements across the organization. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Define and implement the enterprise-wide SRE strategy, framework, governance model, and operating model. 

• Establish SRE standards, policies, and best practices, including SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, reliability KPIs, and service health scorecards. 

• Design and govern the end-to-end observability architecture, including logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerting, and event correlation. 

• Define and enforce Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) such as availability, scalability, performance, resiliency, recoverability, and reliability. 

• Lead production readiness reviews, resiliency assessments, and reliability architecture reviews for business-critical systems. 

• Architect and promote automation, self-healing, auto-remediation, and runbook engineering to reduce manual effort and improve operational efficiency. 

• Conduct SRE maturity assessments and define roadmaps to improve reliability practices across applications and platforms. 

• Drive shift-left reliability adoption by embedding SRE best practices into the SDLC, testing, CI/CD pipelines, and release processes. 

• Partner with engineering and support teams to improve incident management, problem management, root cause analysis, postmortems, and continuous service improvement. 

• Evaluate, standardize, and govern enterprise monitoring, APM, observability, and AIOps tools and platforms. 

• Establish standards for alert quality, event correlation, noise reduction, and actionable monitoring. 

• Collaborate with cloud and platform teams to ensure reliable architecture and operational support in Azure cloud environments. 

• Drive capacity planning, performance engineering, scalability planning, and reliability trend analysis to proactively mitigate production risks. 

• Provide technical leadership, architecture guidance, and advisory support to stakeholders across product, engineering, operations, and leadership teams. 

• Mentor teams on SRE principles, operational excellence, and reliability-first engineering practices. 

Required Qualifications / Must Have 

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, Production Engineering, IT Operations Engineering, or related roles, with strong architecture experience. 

• Strong hands-on experience with observability and APM tools such as Splunk, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Datadog, New Relic, Azure Monitor, or similar platforms. 

• Strong hands-on experience in SRE operational processes, including:  

• Application support 

• Incident management 

• Problem management 

• Change management 

• Release/deployment management 

• Documentation and knowledge management 

• Strong experience defining and managing SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, operational KPIs, and service health metrics. 

• Hands-on experience performing failure mode analysis, resiliency design, risk analysis, and non-functional requirement analysis to ensure robust and reliable system architecture. 

• Hands-on experience implementing SRE best practices throughout the SDLC lifecycle, including production readiness, release quality controls, and post-incident improvement practices. 

• Hands-on experience with automation using DevOps and configuration management tools. 

• Strong hands-on experience designing, implementing, and supporting solutions in Azure Cloud. 

• Coding/scripting experience in one or more languages such as Python, Java, PowerShell, Go, or Shell scripting. 

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, APIs, cloud-native architectures, and reliability engineering principles. 

• Experience with high availability, failover design, disaster recovery, backup/recovery, and business continuity planning. 

• Strong understanding of performance engineering, scalability, and capacity planning. 

• Experience working in the Retail domain. 

Preferred Qualifications / Good to Have 

• Experience with containerization and orchestration platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift. 

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), GitOps, and modern DevOps practices. 

• Familiarity with AIOps, Gen AI, and Agentic AI tools for intelligent operations, automation, and incident support. 

• Experience with chaos engineering and resiliency validation practices. 

• Knowledge of Agile / SAFe methodologies, DevSecOps, and security best practices. 

• Relevant certifications such as:  

• Azure Solutions Architect / Azure Administrator 

• SRE / DevOps certifications 

• ITIL 

• Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKAD) 

Core Competencies 

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills 

• Ability to influence without direct authority 

• Ability to work effectively across product, engineering, operations, and leadership teams 

• Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset 

• Strong decision-making and prioritization skills 

• Ability to translate technical reliability concepts into business impact 

• Strong collaboration, facilitation, and leadership capabilities