Senior Site Reliability Engineer Lead

Akamai Career Site; United States; Remote; USD 121,000 - 219,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

Equity awards

Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Akamai is seeking a Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer to design and manage automation for compute infrastructure and services. You will drive operational excellence and support customer-facing applications with Linux, hardware, and performance tuning expertise.

You will lead incident response, post-mortems, and coordinate with engineering, product, and support teams while shaping standards and designs for scalable systems.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant experience in engineering
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or equivalent
• Expert-level Development or SysAdmin experience
• Ability to coordinate work across multiple engineers
• Strong communication and mentorship skills
• Informed opinions on technology and software design

Responsibilities

• Define requirements to influence designs and standards
• Provide leadership and motivation for project teams
• Create and maintain SLOs and KPIs with cross-functional teams
• Investigate and troubleshoot complex problems including incident management
• Participate in on-call rotations and guide restoration efforts

Skills

5 years experience

Development or SysAdmin

Distributed systems

Communication

Mentorship

Interpersonal skills

Tech design opinions

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Linux

Performance tuning

Hardware design

Job description

Do you have a passion for cutting edge technologies and tackling system problems?

Are you a self-starting professional who thrives in a dynamic environment?

Join our highly skilled Site Reliability team!

Our team designs, develops, and manages applications and infrastructure that support Akamai's Compute products and services and compute hardware. You will drive automation, operational excellence, and support our customer facing applications and infrastructure. We do this while maintaining Akamai's mission at the forefront of what we do: make life better for billions of people, billions of times a day.

Partner with the best

In this role, you'll focus on developing and implementing automation and efficiency of the Akamai compute infrastructure and services. This requires creative thinking combined with deep domain expertise on Linux, hardware, and performance tuning.

As a Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for:

• Defining requirements as part of the product lifecycle to influence the new designs and standards
• Providing support, leadership and motivation for project teams
• Creating and maintaining SLOs and KPIs, collaborating with Engineering, Product, and Support teams
• Engaging with our support, operations, hardware, and engineering teams to investigate and troubleshoot complex problems, including incident management and post-mortem reviews
• Participating in on-call rotations, guiding restoration and repair of service-impacting issues

Do what you love

To be successful in this role you will:

• Have 5 years of relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or equivalent
• Have experience with architecting hardware, software, and infrastructure at scale
• Possess expert-level experience in a Development or SysAdmin role, working with large scale distributed systems
• Have the ability to align with strategic business initiatives and coordinate the work of other engineers
• Demonstrate excellent communication, mentorship, and interpersonal skills
• Possess informed opinions on technology and software design to bring to the table

About us

At Akamai, we make life better for billions of people, trillions of times a day.
Whether you're streaming live events, scrolling social media, watching your favorite series, or managing your savings, we're the engine behind the scenes. We provide the world's most distributed platform from Cloud to Edge to help the giants of the digital world work faster and stay more secure, making the internet a better experience for everyone.
Our focus is simple:
Cloud and Edge: Running apps closer to users for instant performance.
Security: Neutralizing threats before they ever reach your data.
Content Delivery: Scaling the world's biggest moments without a glitch.
AI: Enabling our customers to build, secure, and scale AI apps on the world's most distributed cloud platform.
At Akamai, we don't just support the internet; we power and protect it, because behind every great digital experience is a massive hidden challenge. And we're the ones who solve it. When millions of people hit play or pay, Akamai ensures it just works.

Benefits at Akamai: We support your health, well-being, finances, and life beyond work. See our benefits.

FlexBase adapts to your job's needs

Akamai's FlexBase program is yet another way we show our commitment to providing employees with an exceptional workplace experience. It's not about telling employees where to work; it's about supporting employees to do their best work.
We trust our incredible employees to work in ways that suit them best: at home, in an office, or a combination of both.

Connect with us on social and see what life at Akamai is like!

Compensation

Akamai is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. For US based candidates only - the base salary for this position ranges from $121,400 - $218,600/year; a candidate’s salary is determined by various factors including, but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, certifications and location. Compensation for candidates outside the US will vary. The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of annual bonus or incentives, equity awards and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). Akamai provides industry-leading benefits including healthcare, 401K savings plan, company holidays, vacation (in the form of PTO), sick time, family friendly benefits including parental leave and an employee assistance program including a focus on mental and financial wellness; Eligibility requirements apply.

Job Info

• Job Identification 3882
• Posting Date 09/23/2026, 12:43 AM
• Locations 145 Broadway, Cambridge, MA, 02142, US (Remote)