Lead Site Reliability Engineer - Architect & Own Production

Optimal Market Technologies; New York (NY); On-site; USD 175,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Optimal Market Technologies is seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to own production systems administration across colocation and cloud. This hands-on leadership role focuses on automating operations, publishing standards, and reducing key-person risk while partnering with the development team to keep systems reliable and fast.

You will mentor staff, implement Infrastructure as Code, manage incidents, and oversee recovery drills.

Qualifications

• Experience leading production systems in an engineering-driven environment.
• Strong scripting and automation skills.
• Hands-on Linux and network administration.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with AI tools (Claude Code preferred).
• Proven track record in production support and incident response.
• Experience managing and developing technical staff.
• Ability to introduce structure, standards and strategy to a growing function.
• Strong communication with senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own how production runs across colocation and the cloud: deployment, capacity, and failover.
• Build and lead the systems administration function.
• Set and publish engineering standards and strategy for running production.
• Hands-on Linux and network administration; automate with Infrastructure as Code.
• Manage vendors and service agreements; advise on build-vs-contract-out.
• Own infrastructure security: hardening, access control, recoverable backups, and security incident response.
• Assist first-line production support, reducing reliance on the development team.
• Be accountable for production stability: track what breaks and why, and automate to prevent it.
• Own incident response, on-call, and post-incident review; coverage is market-hours plus a support rotation.
• Own recovery runbooks, and recovery drills.
• Automate client self-service for common issues and access to their own data.
• Partner with the development team on deployments, and on performance tracking and capacity planning.

Skills

Scripting & automation

Linux administration

Network administration

Infrastructure as Code

AI tools (Claude Code)

Production support

Team leadership

Strategic standards

Stakeholder communication

Job description

Optimal Market Technologies is seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to own production systems administration across colocation and cloud. This hands-on leadership role focuses on automating operations, publishing standards, and reducing key-person risk while partnering with the development team to keep systems reliable and fast.

You will mentor staff, implement Infrastructure as Code, manage incidents, and oversee recovery drills.