Sr. Site Reliability Engineer III

Description:
Onsite in Washington, DC

our client seeks a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer III to design, automate, and operate mission-critical systems for federal environments. The role focuses on Kubernetes or VMWare platforms, CI/CD enablement, observability, and developer experience. You will reduce developer friction, strengthen reliability practices, and deliver secure, compliant infrastructure that supports agency objectives.

Due to federal security clearance requirements, applicant must be a United States Citizen with an active Top Secret clearance. This is a full-time, permanent opportunity, offering a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package. Qualified applicants must be willing and able to work on a w2 basis.

Salary: $170,000 - $220,000/ yr. w2

Responsibilities:

• Design, deploy, and maintain mission-critical application workloads on virtualized or containerized environments such as VMWare or Kubernetes.
• Ensure scalability, availability, and compliance with government requirements.
• Develop and sustain automated CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and configuration management workflows across all environments.
• Provision, configure, and maintain developer environments and toolchains to enable secure and efficient workflows.
• Identify and reduce developer friction across the software development lifecycle.
• Implement observability and alerting to support defined service level objectives.
• Lead or participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Support container-native and object storage solutions such as MinIO, S3-compatible services, and PortWorx.
• Configure and manage enterprise load balancers such as F5 or similar platforms.
• Establish and maintain customer trust by delivering innovative solutions aligned to mission needs.

Experience Requirements:

• Active U.S. Government issued Top Secret security clearance.
• 7+ years in software development, systems engineering, or operations with accountability for production availability, performance, and reliability.
• Demonstrated experience blending software engineering and systems administration for highly available and scalable applications.
• Experience designing and managing monitoring, alerting, and observability to meet service level objectives.
• Experience leading or participating in incident response and root cause analysis.
• Experience with Ansible and Desired State Configuration.
• Experience with GitLab CI/CD automation and Bash scripting.
• Experience with container-native storage and object storage solutions such as MinIO, S3-compatible services, and PortWorx.
• Experience with enterprise load-balancing solutions such as F5 or similar.
• Ability to contribute immediately in a mission-critical operational environment with minimal ramp-up.

Education Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related engineering field is preferred.
• DoD 8140-compliant certification such as Security+ or higher.