Associate Architect - Site Reliability

Job Summary:

We are looking for a highly skilled and adaptable Associate Architect (9 - 12 Years) to become a key member of our Cloud Engineering team. In this crucial role, you will be instrumental in designing and refining our cloud infrastructure with a strong focus on reliability, security, and scalability. As an Architect, you'll apply software engineering principles to solve operational challenges, ensuring the overall operational resilience and continuous stability of our systems. This position requires a blend of managing live production environments and contributing to engineering efforts such as automation and system improvements.

Key Responsibilities:

• Cloud Infrastructure Architecture and Management: Design, build, and maintain resilient cloud infrastructure solutions to support the development and deployment of scalable and reliable applications.
• This includes managing and optimizing cloud platforms for high availability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Enhancing Service Reliability: Lead reliability best practices by establishing and managing monitoring and alerting systems to proactively detect and respond to anomalies and performance issues. Utilize SLI, SLO, and SLA concepts to measure and improve reliability. Identify and resolve potential bottlenecks and areas for enhancement
• Driving Automation and Efficiency: Contribute to the automation, provisioning, and standardization of infrastructure resources and system configurations. Identify and implement automation for repetitive tasks to significantly reduce operational overhead. Develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and automate workflows using tools like Rundeck or Jenkins.
• Incident Response and Resolution: Participate in and help resolve major incidents, conduct thorough root cause analyses, and implement permanent solutions. Effectively manage incidents within the production environment using a systematic problem-solving approach.
• Collaboration and Innovation: Work closely with diverse stakeholders and cross-functional teams, including software engineers, to integrate cloud solutions, gather requirements, and execute Proof of Concepts (POCs). Foster strong collaboration and communication. Guide designs and processes with a focus on resilience and minimizing manual effort. Promote the adoption of common tooling and components, and implement software and tools to enhance resilience and automate operations. Be open to adopting new tools and approaches as needed.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Cloud Platforms: Demonstrated expertise in at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Extensive experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) technologies.
• Automation & IaC: Proficiency in scripting languages (shell and Python). Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible or Puppet). Must have exposure to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (Terraform or CloudFormation).
• Monitoring & Observability: Experience setting up and configuring monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, or the ELK stack). Hands-on experience implementing OpenTelemetry for observability.
• Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools for cloud-based applications.
• Service Reliability Concepts: A strong understanding of SLI, SLO, SLA, and error budgeting.
• Infrastructure Management: Proven proficiency in on-premises hosting and virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, or KVM). Solid understanding of storage internals (NAS, SAN, EFS, NFS) and protocols (FTP, SFTP, SMTP, NTP, DNS, DHCP). Experience with networking and firewall technologies.
• Strong hands-on experience with Linux internals and operating systems (RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux).
• Experience with Windows operating systems to support varied environments.
• Soft Skills & Mindset: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills for effective teamwork. We value proactive individuals who are eager to learn and adapt in a dynamic environment. Must possess a pragmatic and adaptable mindset, with a willingness to step outside comfort zones and acquire new skills. Ability to consider the broader system impact of your work. Must be a change advocate for reliability initiatives.

Desired/Bonus Skills:

• Experience with DevOps toolchain elements like Git, Jenkins, Rundeck, ArgoCD, or Crossplane.
• Experience with database management, particularly MySQL and Hadoop.
• Knowledge of cloud cost management and optimization strategies.
• Exposure to Gen AI.
• Understanding of cloud security best practices, including data encryption, access controls, and identity management.
• Experience implementing disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
• Familiarity with ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) processes