Senior Site Reliability Engineer I

Elsevier; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); On-site; USD 95,000 - 159,000; Full time

Job summary

Elsevier is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to drive reliability, scalability, and performance of critical platforms and services. You will lead automation efforts, reduce toil, and collaborate with engineering teams to design resilient systems that deliver strong customer experiences.

You will focus on observability, incident response, and distributed systems, building solutions that improve availability, recovery, and production readiness.

Qualifications

• Advanced Terraform: modules, providers, state management, drift detection, and remote state.
• Hands-on AWS operations across ECS, RDS, ALB, VPC, IAM, and CloudWatch.
• Experience with GitHub Actions CI/CD, OIDC, and deployment pipelines.
• ECS Fargate, containers, health checks, autoscaling, ALB integration, and deployment rollbacks.
• Networking and security best practices on AWS, including TLS/ACM and IAM.

Responsibilities

• Create monitoring queries and establish service baselines.
• Support incidents and contribute to post-mortems.
• Contribute to disaster recovery tests and runbooks.
• Implement automation and production deployments for AI-integrated services.
• Document solutions and enable secure self-service for teams.
• Assist architecture in deployment workflows.

Skills

Terraform

AWS

GitHub Actions

Docker

Networking

Observability

Linux

Scripting

AI Tools

Dev Enablement

Tools

ECS

Docker

ECR

CloudWatch

OIDC

KMS

Job description

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Are you passionate about building resilient, scalable systems that power mission‑critical applications?

Do you thrive on automating operations, improving reliability, and ensuring exceptional system performance?

About The Team

Embedded Innovation Teams are cross‑functional squads embedded within our segments to rapidly turn internal AI experimentation into validated, reusable solutions, building the capabilities we need to deliver customer value and growth. We work problem‑first rather than tool‑first, directly inside segment and function teams, improving the internal workflows that help our people deliver better outcomes for customers, faster.

About The Role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will play a key role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our critical platforms and services. You will lead complex reliability initiatives, drive automation efforts to reduce operational toil, and help build resilient systems that deliver exceptional customer experiences.

You will leverage your expertise in observability, incident response, and distributed systems to proactively identify and resolve reliability challenges. Working closely with engineering teams, you will design and implement solutions that improve service availability, streamline operations, and enhance system recovery capabilities.

You will hold a high bar on code quality, flag risks and blockers early, and work alongside host‑function stakeholders to make sure what you build fits real workflows, not assumed ones. You will also support handover and capability‑building so the solution is owned and operable after the squad moves on.

Key Responsibilities

• Creating monitoring queries and establishes service level baselines.
• Supporting senior engineers during incidents.
• Making contributions during post‑mortems and RCAs.
• Participating in disaster recovery tests.
• Implementing automation and executes code in production environments.
• Contributing to SRE knowledge documentation.
• Supporting the deployment, monitoring, and reliability of services integrating AI tools.
• Supporting architecture and senior engineers in the creation of infrastructure topology drawings and deployment workflows.
• Carrying out the testing of availability, reliability, and recoverability in non-production environments.

Requirements

• Advanced Terraform: Expertise in modules, providers, state management, lifecycle controls, drift detection, safe refactoring, and remote state (S3, locking, cross‑stack dependencies).
• AWS Operations: Hands‑on experience managing production, multi‑account, multi‑region AWS environments across ECS, RDS, ALB, VPC, IAM, Route53, ECR, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, Secrets Manager, KMS, and CloudWatch.
• GitHub Actions CI/CD: Experience building and troubleshooting reusable workflows, OIDC authentication, approval gates, runners, Terraform deployments, application deployments, and migration pipelines.
• ECS Fargate & Containers: Knowledge of Docker, ECR, ECS task definitions/services, IAM roles, health checks, autoscaling, ALB integration, and deployment rollbacks.
• AWS Networking & Security: Proficiency in VPCs, networking, ALBs, Route53, ACM/TLS, IAM, OIDC, Secrets Manager, KMS, and cloud security best practices.
• Incident Response & Observability: Skilled in troubleshooting using logs, metrics, alarms, deployment history, root cause analysis, rollback decisions, and operational runbooks.
• Linux & Automation: Strong Linux and Git fundamentals with Bash/Python scripting for AWS CLI automation, CI/CD, and operational tooling.
• AI Tooling Deployment: Hands‑on experience integrating and operating AI services and APIs in production, including monitoring, reliability, and security practices for AI‑powered features.
• Developer Enablement: Ability to support multiple engineering teams, troubleshoot across infrastructure and application layers, document solutions, and enable secure self‑service practices.

Elsevier is a renowned global information analytics company that primarily focuses on providing scientific, technical, and medical (STM) research content, tools, and services. It is one of the largest publishers of academic journals and scholarly literature in the world.

Elsevier operates in various domains, including science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and more. They publish a vast number of peer‑reviewed journals covering a wide range of disciplines. These journals act as platforms for researchers and academics to share their findings and contribute to the advancement of knowledge in their respective fields.

In addition to publishing, Elsevier offers a suite of digital solutions and services to support researchers, scientists, and professionals in their work. They provide online platforms like ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Mendeley, which offer access to a vast repository of scholarly articles, research papers, and other scientific content. These platforms often serve as essential resources for software developers seeking to stay updated with the latest scientific advancements.

U.S. National Base Pay Range: $95,300 - $158,800. Geographic differentials may apply in some locations to better reflect local market rates. This job is eligible for an annual incentive bonus.