Site Reliability Engineer II

Akamai Technologies; United States; Hybrid; USD 95,000 - 171,000; Full time

Job summary

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer II to own the reliability of our private networking, firewall, and IPSec gateway services. You will partner with software engineers, product, and operations teams to safely ship dataplane and control-plane changes across a global fleet.

You will implement automation, build monitoring, and runbooks, and contribute to SLOs for VPC, Cloud Firewall, and IPSec Gateway. Strong Linux networking and scripting skills are required.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of Site Reliability experience or similar
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent
• Strong knowledge of TCP/IP, routing, NAT, DNS
• Hands-on Linux networking and iptables/nftables
• Experience with Python or Shell scripting
• Familiarity with SaltStack or Ansible and Jenkins
• Experience with Prometheus and Grafana for metrics
• Understanding deployment safety: phased rollouts and canaries
• Ability to work under moderate supervision and communicate during incidents

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day reliability of private networking and firewall services
• Automate rollout steps and health checks
• Build and maintain Prometheus metrics and Grafana dashboards
• Participate in on-call and incident triage
• Contribute to post-mortems and TRRs for new features
• Collaborate with software engineering, product, and operations teams

Skills

Networking fundamentals

Linux networking

Packet-trace troubleshooting

Automation scripting (Python/Shell)

CI/CD (Jenkins)

Prometheus & Grafana

Incident response & on-call

Communication under pressure

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

SaltStack

Ansible

Jenkins

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Join our Site Reliability team

Do you enjoy getting to the bottom of a packet that never arrived?

Are you passionate about software-defined networking, secure connectivity, and making large-scale cloud infrastructure safe to change?

Help us shape the future of the Internet

The Cloud Networking SRE team designs, deploys, and maintains the applications and infrastructure behind Akamai Cloud's networking products. Our VPC and Cloud Firewall stack gives customers isolated private networks, stateful traffic filtering, and secure site-to-site and multi-cloud connectivity.

In this role, you will own day-to-day reliability of our private networking, firewall, and IPSec Gateway services. You'll work with software engineering, product, and operations teams to ship dataplane and control-plane changes safely across a global fleet. You will run release rollouts, automate operational toil, build monitoring, and troubleshoot customer-impacting networking issues down to the packet. You will use open-source tools alongside internal Akamai tooling.

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

• Planning and executing phased rollouts of VPC and Cloud Firewall dataplane binaries and feature-flag enablements
• Operating and troubleshooting private networking (subnets, routing, overlay/encapsulation) and stateful firewall rule enforcement on Linux hosts.
• Supporting operation and readiness of the IPSec Gateway and Multi-Cloud Networking services, including tunnel health, IKE/IPsec negotiation issues, and cross-cloud connectivity.
• Automating rollout steps, health checks, and recurring operational tasks using Python, Shell, and SaltStack.
• Building and maintaining Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, alerts, and runbooks; support and improve SLOs for VPC, Cloud Firewall, and IPSec Gateway.
• Joining on-call and incident triage for networking issues, drive mitigation to reduce MTTR, and contribute to post-mortem reviews and follow-up actions.
• Contributing to Technical Readiness Reviews (TRRs) for new features, and keep SOPs and team knowledge bases current.

Do what you love

To be successful in this role you will:

• Have 2 years of relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or its equivalent
• Have an understanding of core networking: TCP/IP, subnetting, L2/L3 routing, NAT, DNS, and stateful firewalling.
• Possess hands-on Linux networking experience: network namespaces, bridges, virtual interfaces, iptables/nftables, and connection tracking (conntrack).
• Possess packet-level troubleshooting skills with tools such as tcpdump, Wireshark/tshark, ip, ss, traceroute, and mtr.
• Have experience writing automation in Python or Shell, and with configuration management (SaltStack or Ansible) and CI/CD (Jenkins).
• Have experience with Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, dashboards, and alerting.
• Have a clear understanding of deployment safety: phased rollouts, canaries, feature flags, validation, and rollback.
• Possess the ability to work effectively with moderate supervision, communicate clearly during incidents, and prioritize operational work.

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 $95,000 - $171,000/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.