Site Reliability Engineer

Skyward

Site Reliability Engineer supporting the modernization of CMS systems at Skyward. Focus on AWS environments and infrastructure management while ensuring user satisfaction and system reliability.

Posted 6/17/2026full-timeRockville • Maryland • 🇺🇸 United StatesMid-LevelSenior💰 $112,000 - $150,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AnsibleAWSCloudDockerJenkinsPythonSplunkTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Join the team supporting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as it merges and modernizes its enterprise knowledge and data systems into a single, AI-driven platform, reducing manual effort, improving data accuracy, and enhancing transparency for stakeholders.
Keep the systems up and the users happy. Operate and tune AWS environments to meet infrastructure and application availability SLAs, even during transition and change.
Build observability that actually informs. Implement continuous monitoring, alerting, and dashboards using tools like AWS CloudWatch, New Relic, and Splunk, and establish performance baselines so you can spot degradation before users do.
Automate the toil. Write infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible) and support CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins) and containerized workloads (Docker) for repeatable, reliable deployments.
Define and track the numbers that matter. Set and monitor SLIs and SLOs, and produce performance, load/stress, and bottleneck reports that drive smarter decisions.
Optimize for performance, security, and cost. Use tools like AWS Trusted Advisor to find and act on improvement opportunities.
Support security and compliance modernization. Partner with the Security & Compliance SME to review vulnerability and security scans, feed continuous monitoring, and help advance the move toward a Continuous ATO (cATO) within a FISMA Moderate boundary (RMF, ARS, IS2P2).
Strengthen resilience. Help design and maintain disaster recovery and COOP continuity so the systems hold up against outages, incidents, and the unexpected.
Own incidents end to end. Drive response, run blameless post-mortems, and implement the preventative fixes that keep the same thing from happening twice.

Requirements

What you’ll need

A bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field (or equivalent hands-on experience).
3–5 years of experience in site reliability, systems, or cloud engineering, with meaningful time spent in AWS environments.
Solid working knowledge of core AWS services, architecture, and best practices.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation).
A good understanding of CI/CD pipelines and automation tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar).
Comfort scripting and automating in Python.
Familiarity with monitoring and observability tooling (CloudWatch, New Relic, Splunk, or comparable).
Strong problem-solving instincts and the composure to work calmly under pressure.
Clear communication skills, with the ability to make complex technical concepts understandable.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Medical, dental, vision insurance (fully paid for employees)
15 days of paid leave
7 days of sick leave
2 days bereavement leave
11 paid Federal holidays
Up to 40 hours for jury duty
401K with 4% employer contribution (and no vesting period)
Up to 4 weeks of paid paternity and maternity leave
Company provided laptop
$5,000 per year for professional development
$600 per year for technical supplies and equipment
$2,000 referral bonus
Life and disability insurance
HSA and FSA
Legal Shield and ID Shield Voluntary Benefits
Opportunity to work in a collaborative, motivated team focused on modernizing government services with cutting-edge technology and innovative solutions. Who says government work can't be exciting!

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

AWSinfrastructure-as-codeTerraformAnsibleCI/CDJenkinsDockerPythonmonitoringobservability

Soft Skills

problem-solvingcommunicationcalm under pressure

Certifications

bachelor’s degree in computer sciencebachelor’s degree in engineeringFISMA Moderate