Site Reliability Engineer

Description:

We are hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to build and support reliable infrastructure for teams across McGraw Hill. On the Kubericks SRE team, you will help operate our AWS EKS and Databricks platforms, improve their security and observability, and partner with application and data teams to resolve production issues and make services easier to run.

This position is a full-time contract position. If you have an automation mindset, know AWS services inside out, have distributed system / micro service experience, can triage complex cloud / application stack issues, like to solve engineering problems and lead by example then you will thrive in this position

About you:

You are a strong communicator, both verbally and written

You take ownership for the quality of your individual efforts

You have proven experience in building and managing large-scale cloud systems and tools in AWS in repeatable and maintainable ways (Zero Downtime).

You have experience as an SRE/Devops Professional working on n-Tier AWS architecture.

You are adept at authoring, reviewing, and deploying Terraform. Including modules

You have hands-on experience in maintaining/triaging/managing Kubernetes

You treat people with respect, have a good sense of humor and are non-abrasive.

You are constantly reading and learning. Ever the consumer of knowledge.

Specifically looking for

Hands-on experience operating or supporting AWS EKS in production, including troubleshooting Kubernetes workloads, networking, and cluster health.

Experience supporting Databricks workloads or platform services, or a strong foundation in data platforms with an interest in developing Databricks expertise.

Experience using Terraform to deliver repeatable infrastructure changes and improve platform reliability.

A collaborative approach to supporting other engineering teams, investigating incidents, and turning recurring support work into automation and runbooks.

Should have

Experience as a Software Engineer, Software Developer in Test, SRE, or Devops Engineer with practical experience developing and/or supporting enterprise applications

Experience with infrastructure automation technologies like Terraform (3+ years of every day use preferred)

Expertise in container/container-fleet-orchestration technologies, specifically EKS and/or ECS

Versatility with troubleshooting diverse sets of hosting technologies: web server platforms, application platforms, operating systems, network components, virtualization technologies, storage, and database platforms.

Expertise with continuous-deployment based software development lifecycles (e.g. CI/CD)

Cloud database operations and deployment experience (RDS MySQL/Postgres/Aurora)

Expertise with Lean/Agile deployment processes (Blue/Green, ZDT, Canary, DNS migration strategies)

Familiarity with telemetry SaaS systems like New Relic and Datadog or similar systems from other vendors

Strong problem solving, triage, root cause analysis and systems engineering skills

Demonstrated expertise building and managing highly scaled production infrastructure in the cloud

Experience with AI tooling and integrations, including AI assistants and productivity tools (Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, etc.).

Nice to Have

MHE is a polyglot organization. Being “conversational” in JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Golang, Java, Bash, Markdown, reStructuredText, HCL, JSON, YAML, and TOML is a huge plus.

BS Degree in Computer Science (or related technical field and/or equivalent industry experience) preferred

Your contributions would include:

Design, build, and maintain Kubernetes releases using established Terraform patterns, with attention to security, observability, and operational readiness.

Support teams using EKS and Databricks, including production triage, root-cause analysis, and improvements to monitoring and documentation.

Ensure repeatability, traceability, and transparency of our infrastructure automation (infrastructure-as-code, monitoring-as-code)

Evaluate emerging Kubernetes capabilities, such as EKS Auto Mode, Karpenter, and Argo CD and identify where they could improve the platform.

Support on-call rotations for operational duties that have not been addressed with automation, with an eye for correcting issues that result in on-call alarms

Maintain telemetry that improve the visibility to our application’s performance and business metrics and keep operational workload in-check

Participate in the on-call rotation and reduce recurring alerts and manual operational work through automation.

Support healthy software development practices, including complying with agile software development methodology, performing code reviews, work packaging, and continuous delivery

Participate in failure injection and chaos testing efforts

Observe and document steady state production levels, growth patterns

Coordinate improvements of existing software and infrastructure to meet resiliency goals

Our cloud stack includes:

Clouds: AWS, Azure, Oracle

We support the shared AWS EKS and Databricks platforms supporting application, analytics, and data teams across McGraw Hill. Along with some disperate analytics systems in Oracle cloud and possibly Azure.

AWS Cloud Tech: AWS ( S3, EC2, ECS, EKS, SQS, Elasticache Redis, Elasticache Memcache, Elasticache Valkey, RDS, Aurora RDS, Open Search/Elastic Search, Dynamodb, Athena, Route53, WAF, IAM, Cloudfront, Load Balancing, ACM, VPCs, Lambda, API Gateway, VPC Endpoints, Routing tables, SES, SNS, Bedrock, Glue and more)

Infrastructure as Code: Terraform

RDBMS: Mysql, PostgreSQL, Aurora including Connection Pooling technologies like Sequelize

Caching: Valkey, Redis, Memcache, Dynamodb

Languages: Python, Nodejs, Java, Golang, PHP, Bash

Container orchestration: AWS ECS, AWS EKS, Docker

Telemetry: NewRelic, CloudWatch, Datadog, Splunk

Build/Deploy/Run: Github Actions, Artifactory, GitHub Cloud, Pagerduty, Slack, ServiceNow, Exigence

Security: Rapid7 InsightAppSec, Crowdstrike, 1Password, DivvyCloud (Insight Cloudsec), Security Scorecard, WAF, dependabot, checkov, Github Advanced Security scanning, Secret scanning, VDP

Task Management: JIRA

Documentation/Knowledge: Confluence, Office365, DX