Site Reliability Engineer (Hybrid)
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
A full-time, hybrid role reporting to our Technical Support Manager, our Site Reliability Engineer will work frequently from our headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. Residency in the state of Ohio is preferred.
As Site Reliability Engineer, you will own the reliability, scalability, and performance of our production systems hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), working at the intersection of software engineering and operations to build the tooling, processes, and culture that keep our services running at scale. You will be a key contributor to our observability practice - using Splunk for log analytics and alerting, Instana for APM and distributed tracing, and native Azure tools including Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights to provide a comprehensive, real-time view of system health.
This position will be accountable for:
Reliability & Incident Management
- Defining, tracking, and reporting on SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for all critical services.
- Designing and maintaining runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call rotation schedules.
- Designing chaos engineering practices to proactively surface reliability weaknesses before they impact customers.
Observability - Splunk, Instana & Azure
- Building and maintaining Splunk searches, dashboards, and alert policies covering application and infrastructure logs.
- Developing KPIs and unified service-health views for engineering and leadership.
- Configuring and extending instrumentation across microservices for distributed tracing and real-time baselining.
- Creating smart alerts integrated with on call and ticketing systems for automated incident routing.
- Maintaining Azure Monitor alert rules, action groups, and workbooks across Azure subscriptions.
- Utilizing Log Analytics workspaces including data-retention policies and ingestion cost governance using KQL.
- Leveraging Application Insights for APM, availability testing.
- Driving convergence of Splunk, Instana, and Azure signals into a unified observability strategy.
- Building internal tooling in Python, Go, or Bash to eliminate toil and accelerate incident response.
- Participating in security reviews and threat-modeling sessions for new platform capabilities.
The Person
The opportunity to cast a vision for success, to blend art and science with proactive strategy and tactical execution, will be a key to success in this role.
- You're a self-starter. In many ways, you'll help define success metrics for this position. You intuitively understand what will be required to excel at this work and won't expect others to produce the blueprint for you. You'll hit the ground running as the architect for this function, helping to ideate and inform where, and how, with what, and by whom site reliability will be achieved.
- You enjoy wearing multiple hats. At this stage in Unlimited's growth, our thought leaders have an opportunity to speak into and influence our technology, operations, and processes. Having a green field to work in will mean as you build your role, you'll touch on others' work and play in others' courts. If we agree on successful outcomes, how we get there will be a collective strategy and effort.
- You're comfortable with shifting priorities, and some might say you're an expert at context shifting. Not everyone can sustain the exercise of planning strategically but building reactively. Not every day will present the requirement to shift gears, but some days will present the need to be tactically agile. When that moment comes, you'll not only be prepared, but you'll be also ready., Applicants may be subject to a background check. Employees in this position must be able to satisfactorily perform the essential functions of the position. If requested, Unlimited Systems will make every effort to provide reasonable accommodation to enable employees with disabilities to perform the position's essential job duties. As markets change and the Organization grows, job descriptions may change over time as requirements and employee skill levels evolve. With this understanding, Unlimited Systems retains the right to change or assign other duties to this Senior Infrastructure Administrator position.
Requirements
Required
- 5+ years in an SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering role in a production cloud environment.
- Hands-on AKS experience: cluster provisioning, upgrades, CNI networking, and workload lifecycle management.
- Proficiency with Splunk: SPL authoring, dashboard creation, alert configuration, and data onboarding.
- Working knowledge of Instana APM: agent deployment, custom tracing, alerting, and performance analysis.
- Solid command of Azure Monitor, Log Analytics (KQL), and Application Insights.
- Infrastructure-as-Code experience with Terraform; familiarity with Helm and Kustomize.
- Scripting or development proficiency in at least one of: Python, Go, or Bash.
- Demonstrated ability to drive incident resolution and lead blameless post-mortems.
- Clear communicator - able to translate complex technical topics for non-technical stakeholders.
Preferred
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) or Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400).
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).
- Splunk Certified Power User or Splunk Enterprise Certified Architect.
- Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) on AKS.
- Familiarity with FinOps practices and Azure cost-management tooling.
- Experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, or HIPAA).