Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Akka (formerly Lightbend)

Lead SRE ensuring reliability, scalability, and security for Akka's cloud-native PaaS multitenant platform. Engage in operational excellence across AWS, GCP, and Azure environments.

Posted 5/26/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSAzureCloudDNSFluxGoGoogle Cloud PlatformGrafanaKubernetesPrometheusRustShell Scripting

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own Service Level Objectives/Service Level Indicators (SLOs/SLIs) and error budgets across multi-cloud clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS); drive blameless post-mortems and systemic remediation.
Lead capacity planning with our customers, cluster lifecycle management, and Kubernetes and database upgrade cycles.
Define and enforce runbooks, on-call rotations, and escalation paths for the wider engineering organisation.
Own and evolve the IaC layer: Helm charts, Crossplane compositions, and FluxCD GitOps pipelines.
Design and maintain cloud-resource provisioning workflows that span all three cloud providers, with consistent policy controls.
Architect and operate connectivity patterns: AWS PrivateLink / Transit Gateway, GCP NCC, Azure VNet Peering, and cross-region ingress with Contour/Envoy.
Maintain and evolve the Linkerd service mesh for mTLS, workload identity (OIDC), and zero-trust authorisation policies.
Drive PKI hygiene with cert-manager: root/intermediate CA rotation, ACME certificate lifecycle, and secret management via KMS-backed Kubernetes vaults.
Own the observability stack: Prometheus, Cortex (multi-tenant metrics), OpenTelemetry sidecars, centralised log pipelines, and Groundcover / Grafana dashboards.
Establish alerting standards and SLO-based alerting rules; ensure distributed traces are actionable across JVM, Rust, and Go workloads.
Actively participate in on-call and lead the technical response for platform-level incidents.
Set engineering standards and review infrastructure changes across the team.
Partner with Security, Product, and Application Engineering to translate reliability requirements into platform capabilities.
Grow a team of 3–5 SREs through code review, architecture sessions, and career conversations.

Requirements

What you’ll need

7+ years in SRE, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering roles.
Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience: operating and scaling clusters across at least two of GKE, EKS, and AKS in production.
Proven IaC ownership: Helm chart authoring, Crossplane provider/composition design, and GitOps with Flux or ArgoCD.
Strong multi-cloud networking: VPC design, private connectivity (PrivateLink, NCC, VNet Peering), and DNS (Route 53, Cloud DNS, Azure DNS, Cloudflare).
Production experience with a service mesh (Linkerd or Istio) and Envoy-based ingress.
Solid observability track record with Prometheus, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), and structured logging pipelines.
Experience securing Kubernetes clusters: RBAC, workload identity / OIDC, mTLS, and secret management with cloud KMS.
Comfortable reading and writing at least one systems language (Go, Rust, or similar) and shell scripting for automation and operator development.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive salary and equity, benchmarked against senior/lead IC roles in your market.
Remote-first culture with flexible working hours.
Comprehensive health and wellness benefits.
Opportunities for professional development and continuous learning.
Collaborative, inclusive, and innovative company culture.
A team that has strong opinions, writes good documentation, and builds things they are proud of.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

KubernetesIaCHelmCrossplaneGitOpsPrometheusOpenTelemetrymTLSGoRust

Soft Skills

leadershipcapacity planningtechnical responsecode reviewcareer conversations