Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Sierra Ventures; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 5,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Sierra Ventures is seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to own reliability across critical services in Bengaluru. You will define and drive SLOs/SLIs, lead incident response, and champion IaC and chaos engineering while collaborating with development and operations teams to deliver scalable, high-performance systems.

The role requires deep Linux and cloud experience, strong Kubernetes expertise, and hands-on coding in Python or Go, with a focus on observability and automated resilience.

Qualifications

• 3-5 years of experience as an SRE in cloud and on-prem environments.
• Deep understanding of Linux systems, networking, and systems administration.
• Experience with AWS and Kubernetes; strong container orchestration knowledge.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools (Honeycomb, Grafana, Prometheus, Thanos, ELK/Loki).
• Strong programming skills in Python or Go; solid shell scripting ability.

Responsibilities

• Implement and manage SLOs/SLIs and error budgets to guide reliability work.
• Develop resilient systems ensuring 99.9%+ uptime for critical services.
• Lead incident response and blameless postmortems with robust root cause analysis.
• Automate incident detection and response using runbooks or predefined workflows.
• Write production-grade code to support reliability and efficiency.

Skills

Linux

AWS

Kubernetes

Python

Go

Bash

OpenTelemetry

Incident management

CI/CD

IaC

Chaos engineering

On-call

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Thanos

ELK

Loki

Chaos Mesh

Chaos Monkey

AWS Fault Injection Simulator

Terraform

Pulumi

Job description

Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Key Responsibilities:

• Implement and manage Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets to drive reliability efforts.
• Develop systems that are resilient to failures and ensure 99.9%+ uptime for critical services.
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews (blameless postmortems), ensuring robust root cause analysis and continuous improvement of systems.
• Automate incident detection and response using automated runbooks or predefined workflows.
• Write software as needed to support reliability or efficiency needs.
• Design and implement full observability across systems using modern tools like Open Telemetry for tracing, metrics, and logging.
• Use capacity planning, forecasting, and performance testing to ensure that the systems scale effectively as the user base and load grow.
• Collaborate with development and operations teams on building reliable, scalable, and high-performance services.
• Ensure best practices are followed across infrastructure design, deployment, and maintenance using tools like AWS, Kubernetes, EKS, Fargate, etc.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to provision, manage, and scale infrastructure using tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or similar.
• Get involved in chaos engineering initiatives.
• Participate on our on-call rotation.
• Drive advanced alerting and anomaly detection applied to metrics.

Key Requirements:

Experience & Qualifications:

• 3-5 years of experience as an SRE, working in cloud-based environments and on-prem environments.
• Deep understanding of Linux systems, networking, and systems administration.
• Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, with a strong understanding of Kubernetes and container orchestration tools.
• Hands‑on experience with observability tools such as Honeycomb, Grafana, Prometheus, Thanos, ELK (Elastic Stack), or Loki.
• Strong skills in at least one programming language (Python, Go) to write production level code.
• Strong skills in shell scripting using bash or similar. Experience with OpenTelemetry or other distributed tracing systems, including tracing, metrics, and logs integration.
• Experience with Chaos Engineering methodologies and tools (Chaos Mesh, chaos monkey, AWS Fault Injection Simulator, etc.).

Skills & Knowledge:

• Reliability-focused mindset with the ability to balance fast product iterations and system stability.
• Solid understanding of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Hands‑on knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation.
• Proven expertise in incident management, postmortems, and root cause analysis.
• Knowledge of modern deployment strategies (e.g., blue-green deployments, canary releases) and resiliency patterns (circuit breakers, retry mechanisms, etc).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with distributed systems.
• Experience with statistical analysis applied to metrics.
• Familiarity with high-performance, low-latency systems.
• Strong problem solving skills.
• Experience as on-call engineer.
• Experience writing production level code.
• Hands‑on experience running Chaos Engineering drills and initiatives.