Staff Site Reliability Engineer at ASCENDING LLC – Fairfax, Virginia

Required U.S. Citizenship / No clearance needed / 100% remote within the US / EST Time Zone

Staff Site Reliability Engineer / Cloud SME

Location: 100% remote in the continental US

Type: Long-term contract (3+ years)

Role Summary

As the Staff SRE/Cloud SME, you will be a critical technical leader driving the rearchitecting of our existing monolithic system into a resilient, cloud-native architecture. This role requires deep expertise across multiple cloud platforms (Azure and AWS) and container orchestration (Kubernetes) to ensure the next-generation platform meets the highest standards of scalability, reliability, and security.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Transformation Leadership

• Lead the technical rearchitecting efforts, transforming a large-scale monolithic system into a modern microservices-based, cloud-native application.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Engineering, Architecture, Product) to define and implement the new system architecture using domain-driven design (DDD) principles.
• Conduct technology evaluations and provide recommendations for new tools, frameworks, and cloud services to enhance our infrastructure.

Reliability Engineering & Cloud Operations

• Utilize Kubernetes (K8S) for container orchestration and management, ensuring extreme scalability, reliability, and high availability of the system.
• Implement robust, highly resilient, and highly available components for the system.
• Develop and implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting mechanisms to ensure optimal system performance and availability.
• Drive the adoption of DevOps principles and practices throughout the software development lifecycle, ensuring seamless integration and continuous deployment processes.

Technical Expertise & Mentorship

• Stay up-to-date with emerging technologies, frameworks, and industry trends related to systems and cloud computing.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional growth.

Required Qualifications

• Cloud Platforms: 7+ years of experience with cloud computing platforms. Strong multi-cloud expertise required with AWS and Azure.
• Cloud-Native Transformation: 7+ years of experience in rearchitecting large-scale monolithic applications to cloud-native architectures.
• Container Orchestration: Strong expertise in Kubernetes (K8S) is required, including hands-on experience with both AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) and EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service).
• Networking: Strong experience with Cloud Networking, with the ability to design and resolve complex cloud networking architecture problems.
• IaC: Expert knowledge of Terraform for infrastructure-as-code deployment and management.
• Security: Must possess strong knowledge of security best practices for containers and Kubernetes clusters.
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Bonus Knowledge: Knowledge of load balancing algorithms.

Thanks for applying!