Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Applaudo; Kentucky; Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Applaudo is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to own reliability across cloud, edge, networking, and device management for our restaurant technology platform. You will architect, implement, and continuously improve infrastructure that powers global quick-service restaurant operations.

You will work with Global Reliability Engineering, DevOps and security teams in a contractor/hybrid setup with on-site presence in Louisville, KY on Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus on-call coverage to ensure

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience.
• 6+ years of IT infrastructure experience, including 3+ years in SRE or platform engineering.
• Hands-on AWS experience (VPC, EC2, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, IAM, RDS, S3) and Azure familiarity.
• Strong Kubernetes and container orchestration experience (EKS/AKS), including edge deployments.
• Proficiency with Terraform for IaC and GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience defining and operating against SLOs/SLIs and error budgets.
• Experience with enterprise networking and MDM platforms.
• Strong automation skills using Python/Bash/Go.

Responsibilities

• Define and own SLOs and SLIs for restaurant technology systems.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability platforms.
• Lead incident response and blameless post-incident reviews.
• Drive root cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.
• Reduce MTTR through tooling, runbooks, and automation.
• Design scalable, secure cloud architectures primarily on AWS with Azure knowledge.
• Manage container workloads on Kubernetes (EKS/AKS) including edge deployments.
• Develop and maintain IaC with Terraform.
• Own architecture across cloud, edge, networking, and device management.
• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines with GitLab CI/CD.
• Create internal tools and middleware integrations to reduce toil.
• Use AI-assisted development for scripting and troubleshooting.
• Support mobile app deployments and troubleshoot restaurant endpoints.

Skills

Cloud architecture

Kubernetes orchestration

CI/CD pipelines

SLOs/SLIs/error budgets

Automation scripting

Networking knowledge

MDM platforms familiarity

Linux CLI

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

GitLab CI/CD

AWS services (VPC, EC2, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, IAM, RDS, S3)

Azure

CloudWatch/Prometheus/Grafana

Job description

You are a Senior Site Reliability Engineer with strong cloud and reliability engineering fundamentals and the versatility to work across edge infrastructure, enterprise networking, mobile deployments, and operational automation. You will own the reliability, design, implementation, and continuous improvement of the infrastructure behind restaurant technology for a leading global quick-service restaurant brand. That covers the cloud platforms and CI/CD pipelines, the Kubernetes-based edge systems deployed in restaurants, and the networks, MDM platforms, and automation tooling that keep everything running.

You move easily between strategic architecture and hands-on execution, you prefer permanent fixes and automation over repeated manual work, and you work closely with Global Reliability Engineering, DevOps, and security teams.

Note: This role operates under a contractor model. It follows a hybrid schedule with on-site presence on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Louisville, Kentucky. The role includes on-call coverage.

You Bring to Applaudo the Following Competencies:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field is desired, or equivalent professional experience.
• 6+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, including 3+ years focused on site reliability engineering, cloud architecture, or platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, including VPC, EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, IAM, RDS, and S3.
• Working experience with Microsoft Azure.
• Experience designing scalable, secure, and highly available cloud architectures, primarily on AWS.
• Strong expertise in Kubernetes and container orchestration (EKS, AKS), including edge or distributed deployments.
• Solid experience with Terraform for infrastructure provisioning.
• Experience designing and building CI/CD pipelines with GitLab CI/CD.
• Experience defining and operating against SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Experience with enterprise networking, including switch configuration, VLANs, and network troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms.
• Strong automation and scripting skills using Python, Bash, Go, or equivalent.
• Proven ability to build internal tooling and API integrations, beyond configuring managed services.
• Knowledge of cloud security best practices, including IAM strategy, network segmentation, encryption, and secrets management.
• Experience leading incident response and blameless post-incident reviews.
• Comfortable working in Linux command-line environments. Windows familiarity is a plus where restaurant endpoints require it.
• A reliability-first mindset, comfortable moving between cloud, edge, networking, and device management.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to provide technical leadership and mentorship.

Nice to haves:

• Experience designing serverless architectures with AWS Lambda, Fargate, API Gateway, and EventBridge.
• Experience with DevSecOps tooling, including SAST, DAST, container scanning, and IaC scanning.
• Familiarity with security frameworks such as CIS, NIST, ISO 27001, and SOC 2.
• AWS and/or Azure certifications.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, or SIEM solutions.
• Background in restaurant, retail, or distributed edge technology environments.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools for scripting, troubleshooting, and documentation.

You Will Be Accountable for the Following Responsibilities:

• Define and own SLOs and SLIs for restaurant technology systems, using error budgets to balance reliability with delivery velocity.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability platforms that give meaningful signal rather than noise.
• Lead and take part in incident response for restaurant technology systems, including on-call coverage.
• Lead blameless post-incident reviews, drive root cause analysis, and make sure permanent corrective actions are implemented.
• Reduce mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) through better tooling, runbooks, and automation.
• Proactively identify reliability risks across the stack, and track and report system health to engineering leadership.
• Design and implement scalable, secure, and highly available cloud architectures primarily on AWS, with working knowledge of Azure.
• Architect and manage containerized workloads on Kubernetes (EKS, AKS), including edge Kubernetes deployments in restaurant locations.
• Design and implement serverless and container-based solutions using AWS Fargate and other managed services.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform.
• Own architecture across the full restaurant technology stack, covering cloud, edge, networking, and device management.
• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI/CD and modern DevOps practices.
• Build internal tools, automations, and middleware integrations that eliminate repetitive operational work.
• Use AI-assisted development to speed up scripting, troubleshooting, and documentation.
• Support mobile application deployments and troubleshoot deployment issues across restaurant endpoints.
• Manage and optimize MDM platforms covering the restaurant device fleet.
• Configure and troubleshoot enterprise networking, primarily switches and restaurant-facing network infrastructure.
• Establish and enforce cloud governance, security policies, and architectural standards.
• Conduct security architecture reviews to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps.
• Integrate security into CI/CD pipelines through automated scanning, policy validation, and vulnerability management.
• Collaborate with engineering, DevOps, and security teams to deliver secure-by-design solutions across cloud and restaurant technology.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams.
• Create and maintain documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records.
• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and recommend improvements.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in IT infrastructure, with 3+ years in SRE, cloud architecture, or platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience with AWS and working experience with Azure.
• Experience with Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, and automation scripting (Python, Bash, or Go).
• Experience defining and operating against SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Experience with enterprise networking (switches, VLANs) and familiarity with MDM platforms.

About Us

We Are Engineered Different.

At Applaudo, talented people design, build, and scale meaningful, AI-powered solutions that create real business impact. As an AI-native organization, we collaborate across design, development, cloud, data, and artificial intelligence to turn ideas into scalable products that transform how companies operate, make decisions, and grow.

We are building a high-performance culture grounded in five values: Empowering Excellence, Collaborative Teamwork, Unsolicited Respect, Consistent Transparency, and Efficient Communication. These define how we work, how we support one another, and how we hold ourselves accountable.

Applaudo is a place for people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and work alongside strong teams they are proud to belong to. Joining us means being part of an organization that is evolving intentionally, investing in modern ways of working, and leading AI-native transformation at scale.