Site Reliability Engineer

Axle; Frederick (MD); On-site; USD 140,000 - 155,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid Time Off

401K match

Educational Benefits

Employee Referral Bonus

FSA: Healthcare

FSA: Parking

FSA: Dependent Care

FSA: Transportation

Job summary

Axle is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to modernize a complex multi-cloud environment (AWS, Azure, GCP) and build a scalable, secure platform with Kubernetes and AI/ML infrastructure. You will blend DevOps and SRE practices to improve automation, reliability, and compliance, while enabling innovation through AI-driven tooling.

The role emphasizes collaboration, cross-functional leadership, and shaping future platform engineering solutions in a growing, research-focused environment.

Qualifications

• Total 6+ years in DevOps/SRE roles with monitoring and observability tools.
• 4+ years Linux experience (Ubuntu/CentOS/Red Hat) including containers.
• 4+ years automating IaC deployments across AWS, GCP or Azure.
• 4+ years with CI/CD and automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
• Strong scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell).
• Willingness to learn new technologies and adopt emerging approaches.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement enterprise-grade monitoring across distributed systems.
• Establish SLIs/SLOs and error budgets for reliability improvements.
• Develop and maintain real-time asset inventory across cloud and on‑prem.
• Automate provisioning and lifecycle management with IaC and CI/CD pipelines.
• Embed ITIL processes in SRE workflows and ensure security/compliance.

Skills

Monitoring & observability

Linux

IaC (Terraform/Ansible)

CI/CD tooling

Scripting (Python/Bash)

AI/ML tooling experience

Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Docker & Kubernetes

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Axle is a bioscience and information technology company that offers advancements in translational research, biomedical informatics, and data science applications to research centers and healthcare organizations nationally and abroad. With experts in biomedical science, software engineering, and program management, we focus on developing and applying research tools and techniques to empower decision-making and accelerate research discoveries. We work with some of the top research organizations and facilities in the country including multiple institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Benefits We Offer:

• Paid Time Off and Paid Holidays
• 401K match up to 5%
• Educational Benefits for Career Growth
• Employee Referral Bonus
• Flexible Spending Accounts:
  • Healthcare (FSA)
  • Parking Reimbursement Account (PRK)
  • Dependent Care Assistant Program (DCAP)
  • Transportation Reimbursement Account (TRN)

The Site Reliability Engineer role centers on modernizing and consolidating a complex multi-cloud environment across AWS, Azure, and GCP, building a scalable, secure, and observable platform from the ground up using Kubernetes, AI/ML infrastructure, and zero-trust principles. You'll combine DevOps and SRE practices to support mission-driven scientific and clinical programs, emphasizing automation, reliability, compliance, and proactive monitoring while enabling innovation through AI-driven tooling. The team culture is highly collaborative and growth-oriented, valuing experimentation, continuous learning, and cross-functional leadership, with opportunities to shape future multi-cloud and platform engineering solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement enterprise-grade monitoring and observability frameworks (metrics, logs, traces) across distributed systems using enterprise Splunk, Grafana and Open-telemetry tools
• Establish and manage SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets to drive reliability improvements
• Develop and maintain real-time asset inventory systems across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments
• Automate workload onboarding and offboarding processes, ensuring standardization and governance
• Track system ownership, dependencies, and lifecycle states for operational transparency
• Build proactive detection mechanisms using AIOps and intelligent alerting to minimize incident impact
• Design and operate scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure platforms across cloud and hybrid environments
• Implement automated compliance tracking and enforcement aligned with organizational and regulatory standards (e.g., NIST, FISMA, FedRAMP)
• Embed ITIL processes (incident, change, problem, configuration management) into SRE workflows
• Build and maintain automated deployment environments and pipelines that enforce security, compliance, and operational standards
• Develop “golden paths” and standardized platform templates for consistent workload deployment
• Automate provisioning, patching, configuration management, and environment lifecycle
• Leverage AI/ML coding assistants and vibe coding practices to rapidly develop automation scripts, tools, and internal platforms
• Integrate AI-driven tooling into DevOps pipelines for code quality, security scanning, and operational insights
• Lead adoption of AI-enhanced SRE practices, including intelligent remediation and predictive operations
• Champion DevOps and SRE practices including Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, observability, and reliability engineering
• Build developer-friendly platforms (“golden paths”) that simplify deployments, reduce friction, and improve velocity
• Enable and optimize infrastructure for AI/ML workloads, including data pipelines, storage systems, and inference environments, GPU-enabled and high-performance compute workloads
• Build and manage containerized and orchestrated platforms (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Support cloud migration, modernization, and platform standardization initiatives
• Ensure systems meet security, compliance, backup, and disaster recovery requirements
• Evangelize and promote best practices in DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering to developer communities
• Stay abreast of new technologies in your areas but not limited to AIOps, MLOps, cloud computing & deployment, site reliability engineering, infrastructure automation, security best practices, data engineering etc.

Requirements:

• Must have total of 6+ experience DevOps / SRE roles with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or cloud-native equivalents) for on-prem and cloud hosted workloads.
• Must have 4+ years of Hands-on Linux experience that includes Ubuntu/ CentOS /Red Hat operating systems, containers, dependency management and administration support
• Must have 4+ years of experience automating Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) deployments to one of the following cloud platforms Amazon AWS, Google GCP and Microsoft Azure
• Must have 4+ years with CI/CD and automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, GitHub Actions
• Strong scripting skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell or similar)
• Must be proficient using vibe coding and coding assistants to develop scripts, tools and applications for the DevOps and SRE use cases
• Must have proficiency to debug or troubleshoot and/or deploying SQL and/or NoSQL databases, object storage, web servers, open-source programming stack for Node.JS, R, Python, .NET Core, Java is desired but not mandatory
• Must be willing to learn new technologies, adopt and adapt to emerging technologies or needs from a project to a project
• Cloud certifications is preferred
• Certifications in Grafana, Splunk, Docker, Kubernetes is preferred but optional

Disclaimer: The above description is meant to illustrate the general nature of work and level of effort being performed by individuals assigned to this position or job description. This is not restricted as a complete list of all skills, responsibilities, duties, and/or assignments required. Individuals may be required to perform duties outside of their position, job description or responsibilities as needed.

The diversity of Axle’s employees is a tremendous asset. We are firmly committed to providing equal opportunity in all aspects of employment and will not tolerate any illegal discrimination or harassment based on age, race, gender, religion, national origin, disability, marital status, covered veteran status, sexual orientation, status with respect to public assistance, and other characteristics protected under state, federal, or local law and to deter those who aid, abet, or induce discrimination or coerce others to discriminate.

Accessibility: If you need an accommodation as part of the employment process please contact: [e-mail]

This role has a market-competitive salary with an anticipated base compensation range listed below. Actual salaries will vary depending on a candidate’s experience, qualifications, skills, and location.

Salary Range

$140,000 - $155,000 USD