Senior Consultant - Site Reliability Engineer

General Position Information

Reports directly to (Title):

Manager – Site Reliability Engineer

Matrix reports to (Title):

As applicable based on functional alignment

Direct Reports:

Individual contributor; no direct reports

Position Summary:

The Senior Consultant - Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a hands-on technical leadership and consulting role responsible for driving the reliability, availability, performance, resilience, and operational maturity of enterprise and business-critical services. The role serves as a principal technical escalation point and trusted advisor for complex production challenges, shaping SRE strategy and engineering improvements across observability, automation, Infrastructure-as-Code, incident management, reliability engineering, performance optimization, and operational readiness. The Senior Consultant partners with Development, Architecture, SRE, DevOps, Cloud, Database, Network, Infrastructure, Security, and business stakeholders; leads cross-functional initiatives; and mentors senior engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as a principal technical escalation point and SRE consultant for complex, high-impact, and business-critical incidents; lead cross-functional troubleshooting, executive-level technical communication, and service restoration.
• Troubleshoot across applications, database, API/integration, middleware, cloud, server, network, identity, security, and external dependency layers using logs, metrics, traces, events, and infrastructure telemetry.
• Lead root cause analysis for significant incidents and drive corrective and preventive actions that reduce recurrence and operational risk.
• Define, govern, and mature SRE and observability practices, including SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, dashboards, alerting, instrumentation, event correlation, monitoring coverage, and reliability reporting.
• Lead enterprise reliability, operational-readiness, and supportability assessments; identify gaps in resiliency, automation, observability, documentation, infrastructure, and deployment processes and develop prioritized multi-quarter improvement roadmaps.
• Lead strategic toil-reduction programs and design reusable automation, self-healing, and auto-remediation patterns that improve engineering productivity and service reliability at scale.
• Provide technical governance and hands-on leadership for Infrastructure-as-Code, configuration management, GitOps, platform engineering, and CI/CD practices using technologies such as Terraform, Ansible, Argo CD, Azure DevOps, GitHub, or GitLab.
• Troubleshoot complex deployment, configuration, pipeline, rollback, and release failures and partner with engineering teams to improve deployment reliability.
• Support major application upgrades, migrations, platform modernization, patching, environment transitions, and production cutovers.
• Analyze application and infrastructure performance/capacity trends and recommend scaling, quota, configuration, resiliency, and cost-optimization improvements.
• Own technical direction for disaster recovery, business continuity engineering, resiliency validation, recovery objectives/procedures, failure testing, and rollback readiness.
• Partner with Security and engineering teams during critical vulnerabilities or cyber events and support application, infrastructure, authentication, and configuration analysis.
• Establish SRE standards, reference architectures, playbooks, runbooks, templates, operating procedures, governance mechanisms, and reusable engineering patterns across teams.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and operating practices in observability, automation, cloud operations, reliability engineering, platform engineering, and AI-assisted operations; lead proof-of-concept evaluations, technical recommendations, and adoption roadmaps.
• Mentor senior SRE, Production Engineering, DevOps, and Application Support engineers; provide technical coaching in troubleshooting, observability, automation, incident management, root cause analysis, architecture, and reliability practices.
• Use incident trends, operational metrics, SLO performance, risk indicators, and engineering data to define reliability priorities, influence stakeholders, and drive measurable continuous improvement.
• Provide consultative leadership to application and platform teams on reliability architecture, SRE adoption, production readiness, cloud modernization, and operational risk reduction.
• Lead reliability reviews with senior stakeholders, translate technical risk into business impact, and define measurable remediation plans, success criteria, and governance checkpoints.
• Participate in an on-call or senior production escalation rotation where required.

Education & Experience:

• Application & Production Engineering - Advanced troubleshooting across complex applications, integrations, dependencies, and production environments.
• Observability & Reliability - Advanced proficiency in Excel and presentation tools; comfortable working with large data sets, pivots, lookups, and structured trackers.
• Cloud & Infrastructure - Strong understanding of cloud platforms, operating systems, databases, networking, infrastructure services, and cross-platform dependencies.
• DevOps & Infrastructure-as-Code - Hands-on experience with CI/CD, Git/GitOps, Terraform, Ansible, deployment automation, and Infrastructure-as-Code practices.
• Automation & Engineering - Ability to design reusable automation, reduce operational toil, and develop self-healing or remediation workflows.
• Incident & Problem Management - Ability to lead complex incident troubleshooting, RCA, corrective actions, and preventive improvements.
• Performance, Capacity & Security - Ability to analyze performance/capacity trends and troubleshoot application-security, identity, access, and configuration issues with specialist teams.
• Technical Leadership & Improvement - Expert ability to operate as a senior SRE consultant, mentor experienced engineers, influence architecture and stakeholders, establish enterprise standards, lead transformation roadmaps, and drive measurable reliability improvements.

Must Have Skills

• Advanced expertise in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Production Support, and Application Operations, including troubleshooting complex enterprise applications and distributed systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with Observability and Monitoring platforms such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, logging, tracing, alerting, and telemetry analytics.
• Deep knowledge of Cloud Platforms and Infrastructure Technologies including Azure, AWS, GCP, Linux/Unix, Windows, networking, databases, and enterprise architecture dependencies.
• Extensive experience with DevOps, CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, Argo CD, and related automation frameworks.
• Proven ability to lead major incident management, root cause analysis (RCA), problem management, and service restoration efforts for business-critical applications and platforms.
• Strong expertise in automation engineering, scripting, self-healing solutions, operational tooling, and reducing manual operational effort through scalable automation.
• Advanced understanding of Performance Engineering, Capacity Planning, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Security, Identity Management, and Operational Resilience principles.
• Demonstrated experience defining and implementing SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets, Reliability Metrics, and Production Readiness standards to improve service reliability and operational excellence.
• Ability to provide technical leadership, mentoring, and consultative guidance to engineering teams, influencing architectural decisions and driving reliability-focused transformation initiatives.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills with the ability to translate technical risks into business impacts and drive measurable improvement outcomes.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience implementing and governing SRE practices such as SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets, Reliability Reviews, and Production Readiness Assessments.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, container platforms, service mesh technologies, and cloud-native application architectures.
• Experience with AIOps, predictive analytics, machine learning-assisted monitoring, automated remediation, and intelligent operations platforms.
• Expertise in large-scale cloud modernization, platform engineering, and migration initiatives across Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud environments.
• Relevant certifications such as Google Professional Cloud Engineer, Azure Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Terraform Associate, ITIL, or related SRE/DevOps certifications.

Licenses, Certifications & Training:

• N/A

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Behaviors:

• Strong leadership, consulting, and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence technical strategy, drive reliability initiatives, and communicate complex technical concepts to engineering and business leaders.
• Exceptional analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving abilities with expertise in diagnosing complex production issues, assessing technical risks, and implementing sustainable solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and guide senior engineers, foster collaboration across teams, and promote Site Reliability Engineering best practices and operational excellence.
• Ability to operate effectively in high-pressure environments, manage competing priorities, and make sound decisions during critical incidents while maintaining a focus on business outcomes.
• Strong ownership mindset, adaptability, and commitment to continuous improvement, with a focus on automation, innovation, reliability, customer experience, and long-term operational maturity.