Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) | Cognitive Minds | Washington, DC

Job Title: Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) | Cognitive Minds | Washington, DC

Recruiting Company: Cognitive Minds
Job Location: Washington, DC
Job Type: Contract Position
Application Method:

Position Summary

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) will be responsible for designing, operating, and scaling highly reliable, resilient, and secure cloud-native systems. This role is crucial in ensuring performance, observability, automation, and continuous improvement across critical infrastructure and application services.

Detailed Job Description

As an SRE, you will support hybrid and cloud environments (AWS/Azure), implement infrastructure automation, and enforce reliability through CI/CD, monitoring, SLO/SLIs, and incident response best practices. You will work closely with DevOps, Cloud Engineering, and Development teams to enhance system uptime, optimize performance, and build self-healing infrastructures. This role requires strong experience with containers, orchestration, IaC, observability platforms, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain reliable, scalable cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure
• Implement infrastructure as code using Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar tools
• Manage Kubernetes clusters and containerized workloads (EKS, AKS, Docker)
• Develop CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalent
• Implement observability solutions using Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or similar tools
• Automate deployments, provisioning, monitoring, and incident responses
• Troubleshoot production issues related to performance, networking, and application failures
• Improve resilience through chaos engineering, failover testing, and SRE best practices
• Work with cross-functional teams to drive operational excellence and reduce toil
• Manage incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortems

Required Qualifications & Skills

• Proven experience as an SRE, DevOps Engineer, or Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
• Hands‑on expertise with AWS and/or Azure cloud platforms
• Strong skills in Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration
• Proficiency with IaC tools: Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible
• Deep understanding of Linux systems, networking, and databases
• Experience with CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.)
• Strong scripting ability (Python, Bash)
• Familiarity with observability tools (Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.)
• Experience in performance engineering, scalability, and distributed systems troubleshooting
• Knowledge of ITIL, incident management, and ServiceNow workflows

✨ Nice‑to‑Have Skills

• Certifications in AWS/Azure/CKA
• Experience with serverless computing or service mesh
• Hands‑on with Kafka, Redis, or other distributed systems
• Exposure to zero‑downtime deployments and reliability automation patterns

Recruitment Pro Tip

Showcase real‑world SRE achievements—especially performance improvements, reduced MTTR, automation wins, or Kubernetes/IaC projects. Quantified reliability impact is one of the strongest differentiators for SRE contract roles.