Site Reliability Engineer - L3

The core requirements for the job include the following:

Database Administration (DBA) Skills:

• Relational Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MS SQL Server.
• Database Backup and Recovery: Tools and strategies for database backups and disaster recovery.
• Performance Tuning: Query optimisation, indexing strategies, and database performance troubleshooting.
• Database Security: User management, roles, access control, and auditing.

Infrastructure as a Service Knowledge:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes.
• Kubernetes and Containers: Good knowledge and understanding of Kubernetes and usage of containers.
• Observability Tools: ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
• Database Migration: Migrating databases across different platforms or cloud environments.
• Infrastructure Scaling: Vertical and horizontal scaling techniques in cloud environments.

SRE Principles and Knowledge (Site Reliability Engineering):

• Strong hands-on experience in AWS and Azure clouds and a fair understanding of Google Cloud would be required.
• Experience in handling APIs, troubleshooting API calls, and ensuring seamless integration and performance.
• Incident Management: Handling database outages, incident response, and on-call rotations.
• Monitoring and Alerting: Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, suggest proactive monitoring for the application stack
• Understanding on core SRE principles: SLA, SLI, SLO, error budgets, etc.
• Disaster Recovery Planning: Ensuring high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions.
• Performance Optimisation: Track latency, slow performance and high utilisation issues and recommend optimisation as required.

Scripting and Automation:

• Scripting Languages: Python, shell scripting, Bash, and PowerShell.
• Automation Tools: Ansible, Puppet, and Chef.
• Infrastructure Automation: Automating database deployment, patching, and scaling.

Networking and Infrastructure:

• Networking Basics: TCP/IP, DNS, firewalls, and load balancers.
• Database Connectivity: Connection pooling, failover strategies, and multi-region deployment.
• Storage and Disc Management: Understanding IOPS, latency, and throughput.
• Infrastructure: Familiarity with AWS services like EC2 S3 VPC, and Security
• Groups, Private and Public subnets, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, etc. and Azure services like Virtual Machines, Azure functions, virtual networks, resource managers, etc.

OS Skills:

• Expertise in Linux OS (RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS).
• Understanding of file systems (ext4 XFS, etc. ), permissions, and ownerships.
• Knowledge of process monitoring, management, and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency with tools like top, htop, vmstat, iostat, sar, and dstat to monitor CPU, memory, disc I/O, and network usage.
• Ability to analyse system logs (/var/log/, journalctl, dmesg) for troubleshooting.
• Understanding of resource limits (CPU, memory, disc, and network) and how they impact database performance.
• Knowledge of partitioning tools (fdisk, parted) and file system management (mkfs, mount, umount).
• Understanding of RAID configurations and Logical Volume Management (LVM) for storage scalability.

Troubleshooting and Debugging:

• Log Analysis: Reading and analysing database and system logs.
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Performing in-depth analysis after major incidents and sharing RCA with customers.
• Query Performance: Analysing slow queries, deadlocks, and resource contention.

Soft Skills:

• Communication Skills: Clear written and verbal communication with internal and external stakeholders.
• Problem-Solving: Ability to prioritise, troubleshoot critical issues and bring them to closure.
• Collaboration: Working closely with DevOps, infrastructure, and engineering teams.