Senior Site Reliability Engineer

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.

***Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time, including CPT/OPT.***

The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will be a technical leader driving reliability initiatives across Empower’s critical financial services infrastructure. You will architect solutions to complex operational challenges, mentor engineers, and establish best practices that help the platform scale to serve millions of customers with high reliability.

What you will do

• 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 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.

• Build advanced Infrastructure as Code solutions using Terraform, including modules, workspaces, and state management.

• Architect and optimize multi-cluster EKS environments, including pod autoscaling, cluster autoscaling, and resource optimization.

• Design observability strategies using Datadog and Splunk, including metrics, dashboards, and alerting that support proactive detection.

• Implement progressive delivery mechanisms (canary and blue-green deployments) within GitOps workflows.

• Build automation frameworks that reduce operational toil and improve team efficiency.

• Partner with development teams to improve application reliability, including design reviews and architectural guidance.

• Mentor junior and intermediate SREs through coaching and code reviews.

• 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.

• 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.

What you will bring

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or similar emphasis, or equivalent experience.

• 4 to 7 years of Site Reliability Engineering experience (or equivalent), with a track record operating large-scale production systems.

• Deep, hands-on expertise in AWS across a broad range of services and architectural patterns.

• Advanced Kubernetes knowledge, including custom resources, operators, and cluster federation concepts.

• Expert 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 such as 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.

What will set you apart

• Experience in financial services or the 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.

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.

What we offer you

We offer an array of diverse and inclusive benefits regardless of where you are in your career. We believe that providing our employees with the means to lead healthy balanced lives results in the best possible work performance.

• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• Retirement savings – 401(k) plan with generous company matching contributions (up to 6%), financial advisory services, potential company discretionary contribution, and a broad investment lineup
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250/year
• Business-casual environment that includes the option to wear jeans
• Generous paid time off upon hire – including a paid time off program plus ten paid company holidays and three floating holidays each calendar year
• Paid volunteer time — 16 hours per calendar year
• Leave of absence programs – including paid parental leave, paid short- and long-term disability, and Family and Medical Leave (FMLA)
• Business Resource Groups (BRGs) –  BRGs facilitate inclusion and collaboration across our business internally and throughout the communities where we live, work and play. BRGs are open to all.

Base Salary Range

The salary range above shows the typical minimum to maximum base salary range for this position in the location listed. Non-sales positions have the opportunity to participate in a bonus program. Sales positions are eligible for sales incentives, and in some instances a bonus plan, whereby total compensation may far exceed base salary depending on individual performance. Actual compensation offered may vary from posted hiring range based upon geographic location, work experience, education, licensure requirements and/or skill level and will be finalized at the time of offer.

Equal opportunity employer •  Drug-free workplace

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 (40 and over), 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. 

***For remote and hybrid positions you will be required to provide reliable high-speed internet with a wired connection as well as a place in your home to work with limited disruption. You must have reliable connectivity from an internet service provider that is fiber, cable or DSL internet. Other necessary computer equipment, will be provided. You may be required to work in the office if you do not have an adequate home work environment and the required internet connection.***

Job Posting End Date at 12:01 am on:

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