Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer

Position Type: Contract
Location: Washington, DC (Onsite)

We are seeking a high-caliber Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer to join a mission-critical team in Washington, DC, focused on maturing our cloud-native ecosystem. In this role, you will bridge the gap between development and operations by architecting resilient infrastructure, implementing robust SRE principles like SLOs and error budgeting, and driving a "Security-First" CI/CD culture. As a technical leader, you will not only manage high-availability AWS environments and Kubernetes orchestration but also serve as a force multiplier for our engineering teams by building self-service platforms and automated governance tools that ensure operational excellence and cost-efficiency.

Key Responsibilities
Reliability & Incident Management: Define and maintain SLOs/SLIs, manage error budgets, and lead high-level incident response and blameless postmortem analyses.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Architect and maintain secure, scalable environments using Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation to ensure repeatable deployments.
CI/CD & Deployment Strategy: Design secure delivery pipelines (GitHub Actions/Jenkins) incorporating automated rollbacks, canary releases, and blue-green deployment patterns.
Comprehensive Observability: Build and manage full-stack telemetry pipelines, dashboards, and alerting systems using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or ELK.
SecDevOps Integration: Enforce security-as-code by integrating SAST/DAST, secrets scanning, and SBOM validation into the automated software development lifecycle.
Efficiency & FinOps: Monitor cloud spend trends and implement right-sizing strategies to ensure high performance at an optimal cost-to-value ratio.
Internal Enablement: Develop shared playbooks, reusable automation modules, and self-service tools to boost developer velocity and reduce friction.
Technical Leadership: Mentor cross-functional teams and establish organization-wide best practices for fault tolerance and operational readiness.
Qualifications
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
Experience: 5+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering, including leadership experience in production automation.
Cloud Expertise: 3+ years of hands-on experience managing high-availability production environments, specifically within AWS (IAM, Networking, Compute).
Containerization: Deep proficiency with Kubernetes, Docker, and Linux systems administration.
Tooling Mastery: Advanced experience with Terraform, GitOps patterns, and CI/CD security tollgates.
Automation Skills: Strong scripting proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash for custom tool development.
Operational Mindset: Proven track record in chaos engineering, capacity modeling, and managing complex observability stacks.
Communication: Exceptional ability to document technical architectures and lead collaborative engineering initiatives.