Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Gen Digital · Tempe, Arizona
About the Role
At Gen Digital your role will be supporting products and services, including Gen Insurance and Engine by Gen, delivering trusted digital and financial experiences to consumers at scale.
As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will define and lead the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence strategy for our platform. This is a senior technical leadership role for an engineer who combines deep hands-on expertise with broad organizational influence. You will partner across application, platform, security, and infrastructure teams to build resilient systems, modernize our cloud-native architecture, and raise engineering standards across the company.
You will be responsible for shaping the next stage of our SRE practice, including service reliability frameworks, production readiness, observability, incident management, automation, and capacity planning. You will also collaborate closely with other SRE teams to align on global standards, shared practices, and strategic platform direction.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and drive the long-term reliability strategy for the platform, establishing technical direction and operational standards across services and teams.
- Lead architecture decisions for highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems running on AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, and GKE, with a strong focus on scalability, resilience, and security.
- Establish and mature SRE practices including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, production readiness reviews, service ownership standards, and operational risk management.
- Partner with engineering leadership to guide the evolution of platform architecture, deployment patterns, and infrastructure automation using Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tooling.
- Drive the design and implementation of next-generation observability capabilities, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting strategy, and actionable dashboards.
- Lead major incident response for critical production events, improve escalation paths and response processes, and ensure durable corrective actions through strong post-incident reviews.
- Influence the reliability and performance posture of all engineering teams by reviewing RFCs, setting engineering guardrails, and providing technical leadership on high-impact initiatives.
- Champion resilience engineering, disaster recovery, failover design, capacity forecasting, and business continuity planning for mission-critical systems.
- Partner with security and compliance stakeholders to strengthen infrastructure security and operational controls in regulated and compliant environments, including PCI and SOC 2 requirements.
- Drive continuous improvement of CI/CD systems and software delivery workflows to improve deployment safety, speed, repeatability, and developer experience.
- Identify opportunities to reduce operational toil through automation, self-service platform capabilities, and better engineering abstractions.
- Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, raising the bar for system design, operational excellence, and production ownership across the organization.
- Align with global SRE counterparts to standardize best practices, share learnings, and improve collaboration across regions and organizations.
- Serve as a trusted technical advisor to engineering and product leadership on reliability tradeoffs, infrastructure investments, and operational risk.
About You
- 8+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with a strong record of leading large-scale cloud initiatives in production environments.
- Deep expertise in AWS and Kubernetes, including hands-on experience designing, operating, and evolving large-scale containerized micro-service -based systems.
- Strong experience with infrastructure as code, especially Terraform, and with AWS services supporting distributed systems and container platforms such as EKS, ECS, or GKE.
- Proven success defining and implementing SRE practices such as SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, incident management, observability, and production readiness standards.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems reliability, performance, scaling, availability engineering, and failure-mode analysis.
- Experience leading complex cross-team technical initiatives and influencing architecture, standards, and engineering practices beyond direct reporting lines.
- Strong background in CI/CD and delivery engineering, with experience improving pipeline reliability, deployment safety, and release automation using tools such as Jenkins, CircleCI, and GitHub Actions.
- Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Python or Go, with the ability to build automation, tooling, and maintainable production-quality code.
- Experience operating in security-conscious and compliant environments, with familiarity in frameworks such as PCI, SOC 2, and NIST.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to guide technical decision-making from senior engineers through executive stakeholders.
- Experience using AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools to improve productivity, automation, operational insight, and developer workflows, with sound judgment around quality, security, and reliability.
- A systems thinker who can balance strategic direction with hands-on execution and who thrives in high-scale, high-ownership environments.
Interview Process:
Recruiter Screen - Phone Call
Technical Interview with Team member - Zoom
Hiring Team/Manager - Onsite 2 hours