Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.
Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.
As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Empower, you'll be a technical leader driving reliability initiatives across critical financial services infrastructure. You'll architect solutions for complex operational challenges, mentor engineers, and establish best practices that ensure our platform can scale to serve millions of customers with the reliability they expect from a Fortune 500 fintech company.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:
Technical Leadership:
Design and implement highly available, fault-tolerant systems supporting critical financial transactions
Architect infrastructure solutions using AWS best practices, optimizing for cost, performance, and reliability
Lead complex incident response efforts, coordinating across teams to restore service rapidly
Drive postmortem processes for high-severity incidents, ensuring meaningful action items are identified and completed
Establish and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for key services
Design and implement disaster recovery strategies and business continuity plans
Operational Excellence:
Build sophisticated Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using Terraform, incorporating advanced patterns like modules, workspaces, and state management
Architect and optimize multi-cluster EKS environments, implementing pod autoscaling, cluster autoscaling, and resource optimization
Design observability strategies using Datadog and Splunk, creating meaningful metrics, dashboards, and alerting that enable proactive problem detection
Implement progressive delivery mechanisms (canary deployments, blue-green deployments) within GitOps workflows
Build automation frameworks that significantly reduce operational toil and improve team efficiency
Collaboration & Influence:
Partner with development teams to improve application reliability, conducting design reviews and providing architectural guidance
Mentor and guide junior and intermediate SREs, conducting code reviews and providing technical coaching
Contribute to architectural decisions that impact platform reliability and scalability
Evangelize SRE best practices across the engineering organization
Participate in on-call rotations and drive improvements to reduce on-call burden
Compliance & Security:
Implement and maintain zero-trust security controls across infrastructure
Ensure systems meet financial services regulatory requirements and internal compliance standards
Conduct security reviews of infrastructure changes and deployment processes
Participate in audit preparations and respond to compliance-related inquiries
QUALIFICATIONS:
Required:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or similar emphasis, or equivalent experience
4-7 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (or equivalent), with a track record of operating large-scale production systems
Deep expertise in AWS, with hands-on experience across a broad range of services and architectural patterns
Advanced Kubernetes knowledge, including custom resources, operators, and cluster federation concepts
Expert-level proficiency in Terraform, including module development, state management, and complex workflow orchestration
Strong programming skills in Python and/or Go, with ability to develop production-quality tools and services
Production experience implementing observability at scale using Datadog, Splunk, or similar platforms
Demonstrated experience establishing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines at enterprise scale
Deep understanding of GitOps principles and experience with tools like ArgoCD or Flux
Proven ability to lead complex incident response and conduct thorough postmortems
Strong understanding of networking, security, and infrastructure design patterns
Experience mentoring engineers and conducting technical training
Preferred:
Experience in financial services or payments industry
Deep knowledge of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, PCI DSS, FINRA)
AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional)
CKA and/or CKAD certifications
Experience with service mesh implementations (Istio, Linkerd, Consul)
Background in chaos engineering and fault injection testing
Experience with FinOps and cloud cost optimization
Contributions to open-source projects in the SRE/DevOps space
Experience implementing Operational Excellence strategies
Technical Environment
AWS | EKS | Kubernetes | Terraform | Datadog | Splunk | GitOps | ArgoCD | GitLab CI | Jenkins | Python | Go | Helm | Prometheus | Grafana | Istio
What Success Looks Like
Services consistently exceed 99.99% availability targets
Architectural decisions demonstrably improve system reliability and performance
Successful mentorship of junior engineers, evidenced by their growth and contributions
Automation initiatives deliver measurable reduction in operational toil and incident frequency
Positive feedback from development teams on collaboration and support
On-call load reduction through proactive reliability engineering
This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications of the job. The employer has the right to revise this job description at any time. You will be evaluated in part based on your performance of the responsibilities and/or tasks listed in this job description. You may be required perform other duties that are not included on this job description. The job description is not a contract for employment, and either you or the employer may terminate employment at any time, for any reason.
We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.
Workplace Flexibility: Remote