Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

MeridianLink, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

MeridianLink, Inc. is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join the cloud engineering team. You will own reliability, scalability, and observability of financial SaaS applications across cloud platforms, ensuring secure and performant services.

You will design SLOs/SLIs, lead observability initiatives, and architect cloud infra with IaC. The role emphasizes incident management, automation (Python), and strong collaboration with cross-functional teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, or closely related roles with significant responsibility for production systems.
• Expert-level experience with Azure or AWS (or both); deep knowledge of compute, networking, storage, and managed services; experience managing infrastructure at scale.
• Demonstrated expertise in observability: designing and implementing monitoring, alerting, logging, and distributed tracing solutions; hands-on with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, New Relic, or similar).
• Strong background in SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs; experience defining meaningful objectives and building systems to meet them; understanding of error budgets and their role in prioritization.
• Proven experience designing and troubleshooting highly available, resilient, and scalable systems; deep understanding of distributed systems concepts and failure modes.
• Proficiency in scripting (Python, PowerShell, Bash) for automation and tooling; ability to write clean, maintainable code for operational workflows.
• Hands-on experience with AIOps: event correlation, intelligent alerting, predictive analytics, and automated remediation; familiarity with AIOps platforms is a plus.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible); version control and CI/CD pipeline design.
• Track record of incident management and on-call ownership; comfort with incident response and the ability to remain calm under pressure.
• Excellent communication skills; ability to work cross-functionally and influence without authority; comfort mentoring junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain SLOs and SLIs across all critical systems; ensure targets are met.
• Lead observability strategy with comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing architectures; deploy deep-visibility tools.
• Build and own runbooks, incident response procedures, and post-incident reviews; mentor on incident management and blameless postmortems.
• Architect and deploy cloud infrastructure on AWS or Azure; implement infrastructure-as-code and ensure high availability, DR, and business continuity.
• Develop automation and AIOps capabilities to reduce toil, accelerate incident detection, and enable self-healing systems.
• Drive reliability improvements through load testing, chaos engineering, and failure scenario analysis.
• Collaborate with application/backend teams to design reliable systems from inception; conduct architecture reviews and reliability assessments.
• Write production-grade Python tooling for automation, metrics collection, alert management, and operational workflows.
• Champion security and compliance in infrastructure; implement defense-in-depth for regulated fintech environments.

Skills

Site Reliability Engineering

DevOps

Platform engineering

Observability

SLOs/SLIs/SLAs

Python

PowerShell

Bash

Automation

AIOps

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD

Incident management

On-call ownership

Mentoring

Communication

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK

Datadog

New Relic

Kubernetes

Terraform

CloudFormation

Ansible

Job description

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our cloud engineering team. You will own the reliability, scalability, and observability of our critical financial SaaS applications and infrastructure, working across cloud platforms to ensure our customers experience is seamless, secure, and performant services. This is a high-impact role for someone who is passionate about building resilient systems and preventing outages before they happen.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) across all critical systems; ensure we meet or exceed targets consistently

• Lead observability strategy by designing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing architectures; select and deploy observability tools that provide deep visibility into system behavior

• Build and own runbooks, incident response procedures, and post-incident review processes; mentor the team on incident management and blameless postmortems

• Architect and deploy cloud infrastructure on AWS or Azure; implement infrastructure-as-code practices and ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity

• Develop automation and AIOps capabilities to reduce toil, accelerate incident detection, and enable self-healing systems; implement intelligent alerting to minimize false positives

• Drive reliability improvements through load testing, chaos engineering, and failure scenario analysis; identify and eliminate single points of failure

• Partner with application and backend teams to design reliable systems from inception; conduct architecture reviews and reliability assessments

• Write production-grade Python tooling for automation, metrics collection, alert management, and operational workflows

• Champion security and compliance in infrastructure; implement defense-in-depth principles for a regulated fintech environment

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, or closely related roles with significant responsibility for production systems

• Expert-level experience with Azure or AWS (or both); deep knowledge of compute, networking, storage, and managed services; experience managing infrastructure at scale

• Demonstrated expertise in observability: designing and implementing monitoring, alerting, logging, and distributed tracing solutions; hands-on with observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, New Relic, or similar)

• Strong background in SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs; experience defining meaningful objectives and building systems to meet them; understanding of error budgets and their role in prioritization

• Proven experience designing and troubleshooting highly available, resilient, and scalable systems; deep understanding of distributed systems concepts and failure modes

• Proficiency in Python, PowerShell, bash, etc. scripting languages for production automation, tooling, and systems programming; ability to write clean, maintainable code for operational workflows

• Hands‑on experience with AIOps practices: event correlation, intelligent alerting, predictive analytics, and automated remediation; familiarity with AIOps platforms is a plus

• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible); version control and CI/CD pipeline design

• Track record of incident management and on‑call ownership; comfort with incident response and the ability to remain calm under pressure

• Excellent communication skills; ability to work cross‑functionally and influence without authority; comfort mentoring junior engineers

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in the fintech, payments, banking, or other regulated industries; understanding of compliance requirements (SOC 2, PCI‑DSS, etc.)

• Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration; deep knowledge of containerized application deployment and management

• Proficiency with observability as code; experience building custom metrics, dashboards, and alerts programmatically

• Background in chaos engineering or reliability testing; experience using tools like Gremlin or similar platforms

• Contribution to open-source observability or infrastructure projects

• Expertise in network security, application security, or infrastructure hardening

• Experience with database optimization, query performance tuning, and backup/recovery strategies