Lead 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 Lead Site Reliability Engineer will combine deep technical expertise with team leadership to drive reliability across Empower's financial services platform. This role will lead SREs in solving complex operational challenges, establish technical standards, and advise engineering leadership on infrastructure strategy and reliability initiatives.

• →Lead cross-functional reliability initiatives across multiple teams, aligning technical efforts with business priorities.
• →Define and evolve SRE best practices, tools, methodologies, and technical standards across the organization.
• →Architect enterprise-scale, multi-region AWS infrastructure that balances reliability, cost, performance, and security while supporting millions of daily transactions.
• →Establish Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for critical services to guide prioritization and reliability decisions.
• →Lead major incident response as incident commander, coordinating resolution across teams and facilitating postmortems to drive organizational learning.
• →Design and implement disaster recovery plans, chaos engineering practices, and systematic reliability testing for critical financial services infrastructure.
• →Lead the design of foundational infrastructure patterns using Terraform, developing reusable modules adopted across teams.
• →Architect and implement advanced Kubernetes patterns, including multi-tenancy, security policies, and advanced scheduling.
• →Establish comprehensive observability strategies using Datadog and Splunk, defining standards for metrics, logging, and tracing.
• →Establish CI/CD standards and implement pipeline-as-code and progressive delivery practices at scale.
• →Drive FinOps initiatives to optimize cloud spending while maintaining reliability targets.
• →Evaluate and introduce new technologies and practices that improve operational efficiency and team effectiveness.
• →Provide technical leadership to a functional team of SREs without direct reporting responsibilities, coordinating projects and operational initiatives.
• →Mentor SREs across experience levels, conduct architecture and design reviews, and lead technical training sessions.
• →Coordinate on-call schedules and implement improvements that reduce operational burden.
• →Partner with Engineering Managers, Directors, Product teams, and Security teams to align reliability initiatives with business needs, implement zero-trust architecture and compliance controls, and balance feature delivery with reliability requirements.
• →Influence architectural decisions and represent SRE in cross-functional planning and strategic initiatives.
• →Promote SRE culture, practices, and continuous improvement across Empower.

• →Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• →7-10 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering or an equivalent field, with demonstrated technical leadership.
• →Proven ability to lead technical teams and deliver complex projects.
• →Expert-level AWS knowledge, including experience designing large-scale, multi-region architectures.
• →Deep Kubernetes expertise, including advanced features, security, and production-scale operations.
• →Mastery of Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, including experience developing shared platforms and frameworks.
• →Strong software engineering background with production experience in Python and/or Go.
• →Extensive experience with Datadog and Splunk and implementing observability and monitoring solutions at scale.
• →Deep understanding of CI/CD principles and experience implementing enterprise-grade pipelines.
• →Proven experience leading major incidents and conducting effective postmortems.
• →Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• →Experience mentoring engineers and developing technical capabilities within teams.

• Previous technical leadership experience in SRE or Operational Excellence, including Lead, Staff, or similar roles.
• Financial services industry experience and understanding of regulatory requirements.
• Expert knowledge of compliance frameworks, including SOC 2, PCI DSS, and FINRA.
• Professional-level AWS certifications.
• Kubernetes certifications, including CKA, CKAD, or CKS.
• Experience implementing SRE practices in organizations with 500 or more engineers.
• Background in chaos engineering, game days, and reliability testing.
• Contributions to open-source projects with demonstrated community leadership.
• Experience implementing and managing service meshes.
• Experience speaking at conferences or publishing technical content.

This job operates in a professional office environment.

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 to 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, as per terms and conditions of your employment contract