Contract Azure Site Reliability Engineer

Open hourly rate

6-month contract - 40 hours per week

A space & defense company is hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to own the infrastructure behind its ground systems and the embedded software running on its spacecraft through a 6-month engagement. The platform is Kubernetes-based, defined in Terraform, and treated as mission-critical.

The systems are live, the vehicles are flying. What's needed is an operator and builder who has run Kubernetes in production before, can pick up an existing IaC estate without a long runway, and can carry it from where it is now to something more observable, more automated and more resilient on a fixed clock.

What you'll be doing

• Deploy, maintain and operate mission-critical applications and infrastructure supporting spacecraft and company-wide systems
• Build and evolve Infrastructure as Code frameworks in Terraform
• Implement and run observability (metrics, logging, tracing) with alerting that people act on
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for safe, repeatable, rapid deployments
• Partner with software and hardware engineers so they have the tooling to iterate quickly
• Find and fix bottlenecks and reliability risks; tune performance and land long-term stability improvements
• Respond to production incidents, run root cause analysis and drive corrective actions through blameless postmortems
• Take your turn on the on-call rotation

What you'll need

• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform (or similar) for provisioning and configuration management
• Prometheus, Grafana, InfluxDB or similar
• GitOps - ArgoCD, Ansible, Salt
• Docker
• HPC and GPU workloads — Slurm queue/partition design, fair-share scheduling, cluster resource management
• Hybrid cloud + on-prem/edge environments, and debugging distributed systems at scale
• Prior contract or independent consulting work, you land and add value fast