Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) | Cognitive Minds | Washington, DC

Cognitive Minds; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A technology-driven consultancy in Washington, DC is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to ensure the performance and reliability of cloud-native systems. The ideal candidate will have experience in managing hybrid environments, implementing infrastructure automation, and collaborating with DevOps teams. Responsibilities include building scalable infrastructure on AWS/Azure, managing Kubernetes, and developing CI/CD pipelines. Showcase your contributions to performance improvements and automation to stand out in this contract position.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as an SRE, DevOps Engineer, or Cloud Infrastructure Engineer.
• Hands‑on expertise with AWS and/or Azure cloud platforms.
• Strong skills in Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain reliable, scalable cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure.
• Manage Kubernetes clusters and containerized workloads.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines using tools like GitHub Actions or Jenkins.

Skills

AWS

Azure

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Python

Bash

CI/CD

Observability tools

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

🔎 Job Title: Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) | Cognitive Minds | Washington, DC

🏢 Recruiting Company: Cognitive Minds
🌍 Job Location: Washington, DC
💼 Job Type: Contract Position
📧 Application Method: [e-mail]

💡 Position Summary

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) will be responsible for designing, operating, and scaling highly reliable, resilient, and secure cloud-native systems. This role is crucial in ensuring performance, observability, automation, and continuous improvement across critical infrastructure and application services.

📜 Detailed Job Description

As an SRE, you will support hybrid and cloud environments (AWS/Azure), implement infrastructure automation, and enforce reliability through CI/CD, monitoring, SLO/SLIs, and incident response best practices. You will work closely with DevOps, Cloud Engineering, and Development teams to enhance system uptime, optimize performance, and build self-healing infrastructures. This role requires strong experience with containers, orchestration, IaC, observability platforms, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain reliable, scalable cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure
• Implement infrastructure as code using Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar tools
• Manage Kubernetes clusters and containerized workloads (EKS, AKS, Docker)
• Develop CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalent
• Implement observability solutions using Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or similar tools
• Automate deployments, provisioning, monitoring, and incident responses
• Troubleshoot production issues related to performance, networking, and application failures
• Improve resilience through chaos engineering, failover testing, and SRE best practices
• Work with cross-functional teams to drive operational excellence and reduce toil
• Manage incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortems

🎓 Required Qualifications & Skills

• Proven experience as an SRE, DevOps Engineer, or Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
• Hands‑on expertise with AWS and/or Azure cloud platforms
• Strong skills in Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration
• Proficiency with IaC tools: Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible
• Deep understanding of Linux systems, networking, and databases
• Experience with CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.)
• Strong scripting ability (Python, Bash)
• Familiarity with observability tools (Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.)
• Experience in performance engineering, scalability, and distributed systems troubleshooting
• Knowledge of ITIL, incident management, and ServiceNow workflows

✨ Nice‑to‑Have Skills

• Certifications in AWS/Azure/CKA
• Experience with serverless computing or service mesh
• Hands‑on with Kafka, Redis, or other distributed systems
• Exposure to zero‑downtime deployments and reliability automation patterns

💡 Recruitment Pro Tip

Showcase real‑world SRE achievements—especially performance improvements, reduced MTTR, automation wins, or Kubernetes/IaC projects. Quantified reliability impact is one of the strongest differentiators for SRE contract roles.