Site Reliability Engineer, AWS Incident Response Team

Amazon Web Services; Sydney; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Web Services in Sydney is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to join the AWS Incident Response Team. You will lead high‑severity incident calls, triage failures across distributed systems, and coordinate resolver teams to drive mitigation in real time.

You will build dashboards, surface problems before customers notice, and drive automation to reduce toil. The role includes on‑call rotations and opportunities to grow development skills while owning end‑to‑end operational processes across

Qualifications

• Experience in site reliability engineering or related roles.
• Strong scripting ability and exposure to automation.
• Solid knowledge of Linux, networking, and distributed systems.
• Proven troubleshooting of complex multi-system problems.

Responsibilities

• Lead high‑severity incident response calls end to end.
• Own operational dashboards and monitoring.
• Improve detection accuracy and incident response speed.
• Analyze operational data to identify systemic issues.
• Develop automation to reduce toil and time to mitigate.

Skills

SRE experience

Scripting (Bash / Python)

Linux knowledge

Networking fundamentals

Distributed systems

Tools

CDK / CloudFormation

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

Site Reliability Engineer, AWS Incident Response Team

As a Systems Engineer on AWS Incident Response, you will be on the front line of AWS incident response. You will lead high‑severity calls, triage complex failures across distributed systems, coordinate resolver teams, and drive incidents to mitigation in real time while millions of customers depend on the outcome. Between incidents you will obsess over metrics and detection analysis, building dashboards and mechanisms that surface problems before customers notice, and you will drive operational improvements that make the incident management ecosystem faster and more accurate. You will make real‑time decisions under pressure, deep‑diving the largest and most complex technical environment in the world. You will develop expertise across AWS services, networking, and infrastructure, building a breadth of knowledge that few roles offer. Your scope spans all of AWS rather than a single service. You will own operational processes end to end and use data to find the next improvement in how we detect and mitigate faster. You will also have the opportunity to grow your development skills by taking on coding projects that accelerate incident response and reduce toil. This role includes participation in an on‑call rotation covering weekdays, weekends, and holidays. On‑call shifts fall within your local daytime hours.

Key responsibilities

• Lead high‑severity incident response calls end to end: assess impact, coordinate resolvers across AWS service teams, communicate clearly under pressure, manage escalations, and drive the incident to mitigation with documentation throughout.
• Own and run operational health reviews, and build and maintain the dashboards, metrics, and monitoring that surface trends before they become incidents.
• Improve detection accuracy and speed. Identify patterns across events and build proactive mechanisms that prevent recurrence.
• Deep‑dive operational data to find systemic issues, measure response effectiveness, and prioritize improvements against what the data shows is degrading.
• Identify gaps in operational processes, documentation, and tooling, and build or improve mechanisms that reduce time‑to‑detection and time‑to‑mitigation.
• Apply scripting, automation, and generative AI to accelerate incident response and reduce toil, including where AI can augment human judgment during an incident or surface insight from operational data at scale.
• Work with service teams so that learnings from each incident drive corrective actions to completion, closing the loop between what broke and what gets fixed.
• Mentor peers in your areas of technical and operational strength.

About you

• Experience in site reliability engineering (SRE), systems engineering, systems administration, DevOps, security administration, or network administration
• Experience scripting in one or more language (e.g. Bash, Python, Perl, Ruby), or experience scripting in modern programming languages
• Understanding of operating systems (Linux), networking fundamentals, and distributed systems
• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex technical problems spanning multiple systems or services
• Knowledge of TCP/IP and networking protocols such as HTTP and DNS
• Experience designing and developing scripts to automate operational burdens and reviewing scripting changes to ensure they meet the standards for maintainability, scalability and security
• Familiarity with incident management tooling and workflows in a large‑scale production environment
• Experience building operational dashboards, runbooks, or automation that improved team efficiency
• Knowledge of infrastructure‑as‑code and deployment tooling, such as CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, or similar

About us

AWS Incident Response (AIR), part of the AWS Resilience organization, ensures high availability of AWS. When major incidents hit, AIR leads the response, coordinating resolver teams across AWS and driving mitigation. We move fast, but not carelessly, obsessing over observability of the cloud and continuously improving our detection and response speed and accuracy. Each incident feeds improvements to our detection, processes, and tooling, making the next one shorter or preventing it entirely. This is a high‑visibility, high‑impact role with a global view of AWS health that few teams get to see.