Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

MeridianLink is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join their cloud engineering team. The role involves ensuring the reliability, scalability, and observability of critical financial SaaS applications, while also mentoring team members and implementing best practices in incident management.

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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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