Job Title: Infrastructure SRE Architect & Engineering Lead
Location(s): Chicago, IL
(Remote)
Job DescriptionThe Infrastructure SRE Architect & Engineering Lead is responsible for defining and driving the enterprise-scale reliability, observability, and automation strategy across infrastructure services. This role operates at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and operations-establishing standards, guiding engineering practices, and ensuring that reliability engineering principles are embedded into day-to-day service delivery.
As a senior technical leader, this role challenges traditional operations models by introducing measurable reliability frameworks, advanced observability patterns, and automation-driven operations. The position requires leading cross-functional transformation initiatives, influencing platform and infrastructure teams, and continuously improving service resilience, performance, and efficiency through data-driven insights and engineering discipline.
Responsibilities- Define and govern enterprise observability and reliability engineering standards, including SLO frameworks, service health models, and instrumentation strategies.
- Lead the design and evolution of observability architectures, including dashboards, alerting strategies, and telemetry integration patterns.
- Establish and drive reliability practices such as SLO management, error budget governance, and proactive risk identification.
- Oversee the development and scaling of automation capabilities, including self-healing workflows, validation pipelines, and configuration compliance controls.
- Provide technical leadership for reliability analysis, including identification of systemic risks, failure patterns, and resilience gaps across infrastructure domains.
- Drive continuous improvement through structured analytics, including performance trends, capacity insights, and cost optimization opportunities.
- Partner with platform engineering and client stakeholders to evaluate and implement new observability and automation capabilities.
- Lead post-incident review frameworks focused on detection effectiveness, diagnostic quality, and prevention strategies.
- Maintain and prioritize a strategic backlog of reliability and automation initiatives aligned to business objectives.
- Mentor engineering teams and promote adoption of SRE principles, modern operational practices, and engineering-driven service delivery.
Required Skills- Strong expertise in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, including SLO/SLI design, error budget management, and reliability modeling
- Deep knowledge of observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk) and telemetry design (metrics, logs, traces).
- Advanced experience designing automation solutions using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or cloud-native orchestration frameworks.
- Experience building and operationalizing monitoring, alerting, and incident response frameworks at scale.
- Strong understanding of infrastructure platforms (cloud, compute, storage, network) and their reliability characteristics.
- Demonstrated ability to perform system-level analysis, including trend analysis, capacity modeling, and failure pattern identification.
- Experience leading large-scale engineering or transformation initiatives across distributed teams.
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills with the ability to influence senior technical and business leaders.
Desired Skills- Experience implementing SRE practices within managed services or enterprise IT operating models.
- Familiarity with AIOps, event correlation, and predictive analytics platforms.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and integrating observability and automation into software delivery lifecycles.
- Knowledge of FinOps practices related to observability and telemetry cost optimization.
- Exposure to platform engineering concepts and internal developer platforms (IDPs).
- Relevant certifications such as AWS/Azure Architect, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).
- Experience defining and measuring operational KPIs tied to business outcomes and service performance.
