Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Federal Reserve System; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 147,000 - 234,000; Full time

Job summary

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco seeks a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to drive reliability, scalability, and performance of critical systems. The role blends software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps to meet high availability standards.

The selected candidate will work onsite in San Francisco, with a base salary range reflecting District/SF norms and opportunities for growth. Strong leadership and mentoring skills are essential for this team.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or related roles.
• 3+ years in a lead or senior technical position.
• Proven track record of managing large-scale production systems.
• Experience with on‑call rotations and incident management.
• GenAI based Applications: Working knowledge of LLMs and agentic applications a plus.
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain highly available, scalable, and resilient systems across cloud infrastructure.
• Establish and monitor SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs to ensure optimal system performance.
• Lead incident response, conduct root cause analysis, and implement preventive measures.
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
• Architect and manage cloud infrastructure on AWS using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Automate deployment pipelines, monitoring, and operational workflows.
• Build and maintain internal tools and services to improve operational efficiency.
• Collaborate with development teams to implement reliability best practices.
• Develop monitoring solutions, alerting systems, and observability frameworks.
• Integrate security practices into CI/CD pipelines (SAST/DAST) and maintain controls.

Skills

Leadership

Incident management

On-call rotations

Agile/Scrum

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Java

Python

Node.js

AWS

Terraform

GitLab

Docker

Kubernetes

CloudWatch/X-Ray

Grafana/Datadog

Job description

Company

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

When you join the Federal Reserve—the nation’s central bank you’ll play a key role, collaborating with leading tech professionals to strengthen and protect our economic, financial and payments systems. We invest in contemporary and emerging technology each year to support the Federal Reserve and our economy, and we’re building a dynamic and diverse team for our future.

We are seeking an experienced Lead Site Reliability Engineer to join our engineering team and drive the reliability, scalability, and performance of our critical systems. This role combines deep technical expertise in software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices to ensure our services meet the highest standards of availability and operational excellence.

Responsibilities

System Reliability & Performance

• Design, implement, and maintain highly available, scalable, and resilient systems across cloud infrastructure
• Establish and monitor SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs to ensure optimal system performance
• Lead incident response, conduct root cause analysis, and implement preventive measures
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans

Infrastructure & Automation

• Architect and manage cloud infrastructure on AWS using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Automate deployment pipelines, monitoring, and operational workflows
• Optimize cloud resource utilization and cost management

Engineering & Development

• Build and maintain internal tools and services to improve operational efficiency
• Collaborate with development teams to implement reliability best practices
• Conduct code reviews and provide technical guidance on system design
• Develop monitoring solutions, alerting systems, and observability frameworks

Security & Compliance

• Integrate security practices into CI/CD pipelines (SAST/DAST)
• Implement and maintain security controls across infrastructure and applications
• Ensure compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements
• Conduct security assessments and vulnerability management

Leadership & Collaboration

• Mentor junior SRE team members and promote SRE culture across the organization
• Partner with software engineering teams to improve system reliability
• Drive technical initiatives and contribute to architectural decisions
• Document processes, runbooks, and technical specifications
  

Software Engineering:

• Strong proficiency in Java , Python , and Node.js
• Experience with microservices architecture and distributed systems
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and design patterns
• Proficiency in writing clean, maintainable, and testable code

Cloud Infrastructure (AWS):

• Extensive experience with AWS services including:
  • Compute: Lambda, ECS, EC2, Fargate
  • Storage: S3, EBS, EFS
  • Database: RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora
  • Networking: VPC, Route53, CloudFront, API Gateway
  • Monitoring: CloudWatch, X-Ray
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer) preferred

DevOps & CI/CD:

• Expert-level knowledge of GitLab (CI/CD pipelines, runners, GitOps)
• Advanced Terraform skills for infrastructure provisioning and management
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes/ECS)
• Proficiency with configuration management tools

Security:

• Hands‑on experience with SAST (Static Application Security Testing) tools
• Knowledge of DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) methodologies
• Understanding of security best practices, OWASP Top 10, and compliance frameworks
• Experience with secrets management and identity access management (IAM)

Monitoring & Observability:

• Experience with monitoring tools (Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or similar)
• Log aggregation and analysis (CloudWatch Logs, Splunk)
• Distributed tracing with aws X-Ray

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or related roles
• 3+ years in a lead or senior technical position
• Proven track record of managing large-scale production systems
• Experience with on‑call rotations and incident management
• GenAI based Applications: Working knowledge of LLMs and agentic applications a plus
• Experience with serverless architectures and event‑driven systems
• Familiarity with chaos engineering principles and practices
• Background in Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments

The selected candidate will reside within a reasonable commuting distance, as defined by the employing Reserve Bank, and will work full‑time onsite.

• Eligible Locations for Hire: Richmond, VA, San Francisco, CA
• The following Reserve Bank locations are preferred due to the concentration of System IT team members in these locations: San Francisco, and Richmond, VA

Base Salary Range: Min: $146,700Mid: $190,500Max: $234,300 (Location: San Francisco)

The listed salary is applicable to 12th District/San Francisco. Final offers are determined by factors including the candidate’s qualifications, internal alignment considerations, district assignment, and geographic location.

The Bank is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. The SF Fed is an Equal Opportunity Employer. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [e-mail].

Full Time / Part Time

Full time

Regular / Temporary

Regular

Job Exempt (Yes / No)

Yes

Job Category

Information Technology Family Group

Work Shift

First (United States of America)

The Federal Reserve Banks are committed to equal employment opportunity for employees and job applicants in compliance with applicable law and to an environment where employees are valued for their differences.

Privacy Notice