Staff SRE

Selby Jennings; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Selby Jennings is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Technical Lead) to guide a global Platform Engineering program from Chicago. You will shape cloud modernization, reliability engineering, and platform automation while advising engineering leadership.

The role emphasizes hands-on expertise in GCP, Kubernetes, distributed systems, and IaC, with a focus on AI-enabled operational excellence and scalable architectures across teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in SRE, Platform Eng, DevOps, or related roles.
• Experience as Technical Lead, Staff, Principal, or SME.
• Expert-level Python development with automation and distributed systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with GCP and Kubernetes.
• Proven success leading cloud migrations and large-scale engineering initiatives.
• Experience using Generative AI and agentic tools to boost productivity.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, observability, and high-availability.
• Experience with Terraform, CI/CD, and modern platform practices.
• Strong communication to influence stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the technical roadmap for platform reliability, cloud infrastructure, and automation.
• Lead enterprise-scale cloud migration and modernization initiatives with a focus on Google Cloud Platform.
• Serve as the technical authority for large-scale infrastructure and platform architecture decisions.
• Drive adoption of AI-enabled automation and incident response practices.
• Establish reliability standards including SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Mentor engineers and provide architectural guidance across teams.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, GitOps, and cloud-native best practices.

Skills

Python automation & distributed

Cloud & Kubernetes

SRE leadership

Observability & HA

Infrastructure as Code

CI/CD pipelines

Generative AI in ops

Tools

Terraform

CI/CD tooling

Kubernetes

GCP

GitOps

Job description

Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Technical Lead) - Platform Engineering

Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid)

Overview

A leading technology organization is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to provide technical leadership across a global Platform Engineering environment. In this role you will drive cloud modernization, reliability engineering, platform automation, and AI-enabled operational excellence while serving as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the technical roadmap for platform reliability, cloud infrastructure, and automation.
• Lead enterprise-scale cloud migration and modernization initiatives, with a focus on Google Cloud Platform.
• Serve as the technical authority for large-scale infrastructure and platform architecture decisions.
• Drive adoption of AI and agentic technologies to improve automation, incident response, and operational efficiency.
• Establish reliability standards including SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Mentor engineers and provide architectural guidance across multiple teams.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, GitOps, and cloud-native best practices.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, Systems Engineering, or Software Engineering.
• Experience as a Technical Lead, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or recognized SME.
• Expert-level Python development experience, including automation and distributed systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Kubernetes.
• Proven success leading cloud migration, platform transformation, or large-scale engineering initiatives.
• Experience leveraging Generative AI and agentic tools to improve engineering productivity and operational workflows.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, observability, and high-availability architectures.
• Experience with Terraform, CI/CD, and modern platform engineering practices.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence technical and business stakeholders.

Preferred

• Experience supporting globally distributed, mission-critical platforms at enterprise scale.
• Expertise with Kafka or large-scale event-driven architectures.
• Cloud and Kubernetes certifications.
• Background in highly regulated, high-availability, or performance-sensitive environments.

This is a hybrid role based out of the firms Chicago office requiring 2 days of onsite work per week. At this time the team is unable to provide visa sponsorship.