Site Reliability Engineer

About the role

As a Site Reliability Engineer at WSO2, you will combine software engineering with production operations to keep our cloud services reliable, secure and scalable. You will use engineering principles and automation that improve how services are deployed, operated and recovered, while taking responsibility for their reliability in production.

We are looking for engineers who combine an understanding of software engineering, practical SRE knowledge and systems thinking. You should be comfortable reading code and working with automation, troubleshooting across applications and infrastructure, and understanding how components interact to shape the reliability of the whole service. The role combines hands-on operational responsibility with engineering improvements to reduce manual effort and prevent recurring failures.

You will work across public cloud and on-premises environments, including Kubernetes deployments in WSO2-managed and customer-owned cloud accounts, and participate in the on-call rotation for the services you support.

Responsibilities and duties

Build and improve automation

• Develop and maintain scripts and operational automation using Python, Go, Bash or similar tools.
• Build automation for provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, backup and restore, credential rotation and other service lifecycle operations.
• Create workflows that can be retried safely, handle partial failures and report operational status accurately.
• Investigate application behaviour, use logs and code to support troubleshooting, and work with development teams on reliability and performance improvements.
• Analyze services end to end, including dependencies and failure propagation, and address underlying design weaknesses that contribute to recurring incidents.
• Follow established engineering practices for operational changes, including version control, testing, peer review and clear documentation.

Build and operate production environments

• Build and operate cloud environments across AWS, Azure, GCP and on-premises infrastructure, based on product and customer requirements.
• Run production Kubernetes clusters, including upgrades, networking, storage, access control and capacity management.
• Operate stateful services such as databases, workflow engines and secret stores, including replication, recovery, upgrades and failover.
• Design deployments for availability, scalability, security and cost efficiency, and validate recovery against agreed recovery time and data-loss objectives.

Deliver infrastructure and changes safely

• Manage infrastructure and configuration using Terraform, Helm and GitOps tools such as Flux or Argo CD.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with automated validation, integration tests and security checks.
• Use staged rollouts, backward-compatible database migrations and tested rollback or forward-recovery procedures appropriate to each change.
• Detect configuration drift and keep changes reviewed, traceable and reproducible.

Own reliability and incident response

• Define service-level indicators and objectives with product teams, and use error budgets to inform reliability work and release decisions.
• Build monitoring, logging and tracing that reveal customer impact and help engineers diagnose failures across applications and infrastructure.
• Create actionable alerts, dashboards and runbooks that support effective incident response.
• Participate in on-call, restore service during incidents, communicate clearly and coordinate escalation across teams.
• Investigate performance bottlenecks, plan capacity, test failure scenarios and prioritise automation that reduces operational toil.

Strengthen security and collaborate across teams

• Apply least-privilege access, workload identity, network segmentation and isolation between tenants.
• Manage secrets and certificates securely, and address vulnerabilities in infrastructure, images and dependencies.
• Support compliance requirements, including SOC 2 and ISO 27001, through documented controls and auditable operational evidence.
• Work with engineering, product, and other SRE teams to improve service design, production readiness and support procedures.
• Maintain design decisions, runbooks and onboarding documentation, and share knowledge through reviews, training and mentoring.

Qualifications and skills

Must have

• Understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including how software is designed, built, tested and maintained.
• Ability to read and understand code, use APIs, and write or adapt scripts in Python, Bash or a similar language for operational tasks.
• Strong SRE fundamentals, including availability, SLIs/SLOs, monitoring and alerting, incident response, capacity planning and reducing operational toil.
• Systems thinking: the ability to reason about dependencies, bottlenecks, cascading failures and the wider impact of changes, and evaluate trade-offs between reliability, performance, security and cost.
• Hands-on production Kubernetes experience and strong knowledge of at least one major cloud provider: AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Strong Linux, container and networking fundamentals, including DNS, TCP/IP, TLS, load balancing and firewalls.
• Practical experience with Terraform and Helm, alongside GitOps and CI/CD workflows.
• Experience troubleshooting with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, ELK/OpenSearch or equivalent platforms.
• Understanding of stateful systems, persistent storage, replication, backups and recovery.
• Sound security fundamentals, including identity and access management, secrets, certificates and tenant isolation.
• Strong problem-solving skills, a structured approach to incidents, and clear written and spoken English.
• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Hands-on software development experience in Go, Python or Java, including designing, building, testing and maintaining services, APIs or operational tools.
• Experience applying software design principles, error handling, automated tests and code reviews to maintainable, reusable software.
• Experience developing distributed services, Kubernetes operators, custom controllers or reconciliation loops.
• Production experience with PostgreSQL, CloudNativePG or other database operators.
• Experience operating Temporal or other distributed workflow or messaging systems.
• Familiarity with Vault/OpenBao, External Secrets Operator, cert-manager or Kubernetes policy tooling.
• Experience with cross-account access, customer-owned cloud environments, on-premises infrastructure or multi-region disaster recovery.
• Experience supporting compliance audits or contributing to open-source projects.

How we work

• Engineering and operations together. We apply engineering principles and automation to production operations and use operational experience to improve system design.
• Changes as code. Pull requests, review and automated checks are the default. Emergency changes follow controlled, auditable procedures and are reconciled into code.
• Systems thinking. We consider the whole service, its dependencies and its customers when making changes, and address systemic causes of failure.
• Verified outcomes. We test recovery, validate changes and ensure health signals reflect a working service.
• Continuous improvement. We prioritise automation by its impact on reliability, risk and toil, and turn incident findings into tracked improvements.
• Shared knowledge. Decisions, runbooks and ownership are documented so the team can operate services consistently.