Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Cross River; United States; On-site; USD 160,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Cross River is seeking an Senior Site Reliability Engineer to own reliability, scalability, and performance of mission-critical systems in a fast-paced fintech environment. You will lead DevOps guardrails, design infrastructure as code with Terraform, and drive CI/CD automation across teams.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years in SRE/DevOps, strong AWS experience, and proven skills in Kubernetes/Docker, monitoring, and incident response.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering roles.
• 5+ years with AWS (preferred); multi-cloud experience is a plus.
• Strong proficiency with Terraform for IaC.
• Deep experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Docker experience and container orchestration (ECS preferred).
• Observability proficiency with New Relic, ELK, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Datadog, or Grafana.
• Scripting in .NET, PowerShell, Python, Go, or Bash.
• Strong Linux and Windows systems administration skills.
• Knowledge of DNS, load balancing, CDNs, and network security.

Responsibilities

• Define and enforce DevOps guardrails, standards, and best practices across engineering teams.
• Enable engineering to design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines and automation workflows.
• Co-develop and maintain IaC with application teams using Terraform.
• Establish deployment strategies including blue/green, canary, and rolling deployments.
• Build and maintain self-service tooling and internal platforms for faster delivery with governance.
• Embed reliability, security, and observability early in the software lifecycle.
• Define and monitor SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for critical services.
• Maintain observability stacks with centralized logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting (New Relic, ELK, Grafana).
• Lead incident response, on-call rotations, RCA, and blameless post-mortems.
• Perform capacity planning and performance engineering for scalable systems.
• Automate to reduce toil and improve efficiency.
• Conduct reliability reviews and chaos engineering to identify failure modes.
• Manage and optimize cloud infrastructure balancing reliability, cost, and performance.
• Collaborate to improve architecture, resiliency patterns, and fault tolerance.
• Support .NET-based services across Windows and Linux environments.

Skills

SRE / DevOps experience

Communication skills

Linux administration

Windows administration

Cloud computing

Tools

Terraform

Docker

CI/CD pipelines

ECS

Job description

Cross River builds the infrastructure behind the world’s most innovative financial products. Our technology and capital solutions power payments, cards, lending, and digital asset capabilities that move money safely, instantly, and inclusively — trusted by leading fintechs, enterprises, and disruptors across the globe. Our mission is simple: to build the financial infrastructure that expands access and opportunity for all. Guided by a culture of collaboration, curiosity, and purpose, Cross River has been named one of American Banker’s Best Places to Work in Fintech year after year. Whether you’re designing code, solving regulatory puzzles, or developing strategy, you’ll join a team where innovation and integrity drive everything we do — and where your work helps shape the future of finance.

What We're Looking For

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Site Reliability Engineer with 8+ years of hands‑on experience ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of mission‑critical systems. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in building and maintaining production infrastructure, establishing DevOps best practices, and driving operational excellence across engineering teams. We're looking for someone who takes ownership of system reliability, thrives in a collaborative and fast‑paced environment, and is passionate about building resilient financial infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Define and enforce DevOps guardrails, standards, and best practices to ensure consistency, security, and compliance across engineering teams
• Enable Engineering teams to design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines best to enable fast, safe, and repeatable deployments across all environments
• Co‑Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Application teams using tools such as Terraform
• Establish and govern deployment strategies including blue/green, canary, and rolling deployments
• Build and maintain developer self‑service tooling and internal platforms that accelerate delivery while maintaining governance
• Champion a "shift‑left" culture by embedding reliability, security, and observability practices early in the software development lifecycle
• Help define, implement, and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets for critical services
• Build and maintain comprehensive observability stacks including centralized logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and alerting using tools such as New Relic, ELK, Prometheus, and Grafana
• Lead incident response and management, including on‑call rotations, root cause analysis (RCA), and blameless post‑mortems
• Perform capacity planning and performance engineering to ensure systems scale efficiently with business growth
• Identify and eliminate toil through automation, reducing manual operational overhead
• Conduct reliability reviews and chaos engineering exercises to proactively identify and mitigate failure modes
• Manage and optimize cloud infrastructure to balance reliability, cost, and performance
• Collaborate with software engineering teams to improve system architecture, resiliency patterns, and fault tolerance
• Support and maintain .NET‑based services running across Windows and Linux environments

Qualifications

Area

Requirement

SRE / DevOps Experience

8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering roles

Cloud Platforms

5+ years with AWS (preferred); experience with multi‑cloud is a plus

Infrastructure as Code

Strong proficiency with Terraform

CI/CD

Deep experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and automation workflows

Containers & Orchestration

Strong Experience With Docker And Container Orchestration (ECS Preferred)

Observability

Proficiency with tools such as New Relic, ELK Stack, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Datadog, or Grafana

Scripting / Programming

Proficiency in .NET, PowerShell, Python, Go, or Bash

Operating Systems

Strong Linux and Windows systems administration skills

Networking

Solid understanding of DNS, load balancing, CDNs, and network security

Communication

Strong written and verbal communication skills

Preferred / Nice‑to‑Have

• Experience implementing and managing service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd, AWS App Mesh)
• Familiarity with SRE frameworks as outlined in Google's SRE handbook
• Experience with secrets management (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager)
• Understanding of compliance and regulatory requirements in financial services (SOC 2, PCI‑DSS, etc.)
• Experience with chaos engineering tools (e.g., Gremlin, Litmus, AWS Fault Injection Simulator)
• Experience supporting .NET applications in production environments
• Financial industry / banking infrastructure experience is helpful, but not required
• Crypto / blockchain infrastructure experience is helpful, but not required
• Experience with GitOps workflows and patterns
• Familiarity with cost optimization and FinOps practices in cloud environments

Key Metrics of Success

• System uptime and availability targets consistently met or exceeded
• Reduction in mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR)
• Adoption and adherence to DevOps guardrails across engineering teams
• Measurable reduction in operational toil through automation
• Healthy error budget management across critical services

Salary Range: $160,000.00 - $200,000.00

Cross River is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Cross River does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non‑disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.