Sr. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Design. Disrupt. Repeat.
Be an agent of change on a team committed to achieving client-focused, mission-driven excellence. Steampunk is looking for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer with an appetite for taking on new challenges.
 
Who We Are
Steampunk is the explosive collision of human-centered design and traditional government contracting. An employee-owned company with a startup mindset and time-tested approaches tailored for the federal government, we’re passionate about creating solutions that are impactful, practical, scalable, and most importantly, that meet our clients’ ever-changing needs.
At Steampunk, we believe in disrupting the status quo and setting the pace in the ecosystem of government contractors, while repurposing tried-and-true methodologies. We believe in empowering our people to find creative solutions to intractable problems. We believe the best environment in which to grow and thrive is outside our comfort zone. While good design makes for a good product, we believe human-centered design makes for an excellent one.
 

 
Why Steampunk?
Our people are the very core of what we do; their expertise and hunger for new and exciting challenges fuel our relentless pursuit of mission success. As part of our team of “Punks,” you’ll test the status quo, explore new boundaries, and set the bar high for how government clients expect to engage with contractors.

Because we value our employees’ work/life balance (and believe those who work hard deserve to play hard), we offer a very competitive benefits package, including telework/flex scheduling, health/dental with orthodontics/vision insurance upon hire, paid time off with a sell-back benefit and carryover option, 11 Federal Holidays, 100% paid military leave, 100% 401(k) plan match upon hire, professional development/education reimbursement, all flexible spending accounts, and more

As a Sr. Steampunk Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will be responsible for working with program development teams, infrastructure and platform services teams, and traditional operations and maintenance teams to embrace and embody a shared responsibility for the reliability of an organizations’ applications and infrastructure. As an SRE, your primary responsibility is to combine aspects of software engineering with traditional operations to maintain and improve the reliability, availability, and performance of cloud, infrastructure, and large-scale software systems and services while minimizing downtime and mitigating potential failures.

There are a wide variety of responsibilities you will be delivering in this role:

• Infrastructure Optimization: Conduct in-depth analyses of infrastructure, identifying areas for improvement in terms of performance, scalability, and resource utilization. Collaborate with development and operations teams to implement enhancements, utilizing software engineering and/or infrastructure-as-code principles to streamline deployment processes and ensure consistency across environments.
• Reliability Metrics and Reporting: Define and implement key reliability metrics, service-level objectives (SLOs), and service-level indicators (SLIs) to measure and report on the health of our systems. Establish monitoring and alerting mechanisms to proactively identify potential issues before they impact users.
• Automation and Tooling: Design and implement automation tools to reduce manual toil, streamline repetitive tasks, and enhance overall operational efficiency. Leverage software development techniques to create robust, scalable tooling that supports our reliability goals, and collaborate with development teams to integrate reliability features into the development lifecycle.
• Performance Optimization using Software Development Techniques: Collaborate with software development teams to optimize the performance and resilience of services through code improvements, architectural enhancements, and performance tuning. Integrate automated testing and profiling into the development pipeline to identify and address performance bottlenecks early in the development lifecycle.
• Capacity Planning and Scaling: Collaborate with infrastructure teams to forecast capacity requirements, ensuring our systems can seamlessly scale to meet growing user demands. Implement strategies for auto-scaling and load balancing to optimize resource utilization and enhance overall system stability.
• Collaboration and Training: Work closely with development teams to embed reliability best practices into the software development process. Provide mentorship and training to cross-functional teams on SRE principles, encouraging a shared responsibility for the reliability of our services.
• Incident Management: Lead the development and implementation of incident response procedures, ensuring timely and effective resolution of issues to minimize impact on users. Foster a culture of continuous improvement by conducting thorough post-incident reviews, identifying root causes, and implementing preventative measures.
• Infrastructure and Systems Monitoring: Observe and monitor systems to make sure you have the insight into system performance, health, availability and what is happening internally in the system. Understand what to monitor based on the system(s) you are managing, where to store the monitoring data, who can access historical monitoring data, and how to look at the data to make determinations about future actions.

• Master's degree and 8 years of experience; OR
  • Bachelor's degree and 10 years of IT experience 
• Eligibile to obtain and maintain a government security clearance 
• Knowledge and experience with Agile and DevSecOps methodologies
• Experience in system Engineering in one or more areasd including telecommunications concepts, computer languages, operating systems, database/Data Base Management System (DBMS) and middleware
• Experience with the following software/tools:
  • Source code and binary repository products and techniques (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Artifactory, Nexus, etc.)
  • Infrastructure and Cloud Management tools such as AWS CloudWatch
  • Log Management and Analysis tools such as Splunk
  • Automation and Configuration Management tools such as Terraform or Puppet

Preferred:

• Knowledge and experience with NewRelic and/or other AIOps platforms
• Have programming skills – Javascript, Ruby and/or Go
• Experience with Nginx, HAProxy, Docker, Kubernetes or similar technologies
• Experience with messaging systems, collaboration software, application-based firewall and proxy server(s), and operating systems
• Experience with Linux and Windows operating systems, along with scripting tools and techniques such as Bash, CSH, KSH, ZSH, etc. and/or Powershell.
• Experience with Monitoring and Alerting tools such as Prometheus, Grafana and Datadog

Steampunk is a Change Agent in the Federal contracting industry, bringing new thinking to clients in the Homeland, Federal Civilian, Health and DoD sectors.  Through our Human-Centered delivery methodology, we are fundamentally changing the expectations our Federal clients have for true shared accountability in solving their toughest mission challenges.  As an employee owned company, we focus on investing in our employees to enable them to do the greatest work of their careers – and rewarding them for outstanding contributions to our growth. If you want to learn more about our story, visit http://www.steampunk.com.

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Steampunk participates in the E-Verify program.