Sr Consulting/Principal Site Reliability Engineer

About our Team 

 LexisNexis operates a wide array of both relational and non-relational database technologies to support our high-volume, high-performance search and retrieval platforms. These systems are hosted primarily in AWS, and the SRE DBA group plays a critical role in ensuring they are secure, performant, and scalable.
 

About the Role

Sr. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

In addition to the core responsibilities of a Site Reliability Engineer—focused on reliability, automation, and operational excellence across our services—this role will also include responsibilities within our SRE DBA function. This means your time and focus will be split between general SRE work and cloud/database engineering tasks in close collaboration with our DBA team.

We are seeking an experienced and motivated Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our team. The ideal candidate will play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, security, and performance of our systems. You will work closely with engineering, product teams, and senior leadership to influence design decisions, contribute to disaster recovery strategies, manage incidents, and advocate for best practices in observability and reliability. As an SRE, you will have a direct impact on our platforms and automation initiatives, helping to establish standards and foster a culture of reliability across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• General SRE Work: Ensure the reliability, automation, and operational excellence of our services.
• Cloud/Database Engineering: Collaborate closely with our DBA team to manage both relational and non-relational database technologies.
• Database Deployment Automation: Help automate the deployment of database environments.
• Migrations: Support ongoing migrations, such as Oracle to Postgres.
• Performance Troubleshooting: Troubleshoot performance issues and assist with query optimization.
• Capacity Planning: Work on capacity planning and high availability configurations.
• Technology Exposure: Gain exposure to technologies like DocumentDB, DynamoDB, Redis, and Cassandra as part of our broader platform support strategy.

Design for Reliability:

• Provide guidance and influence key decisions on systems design and production readiness.
• Validate the impact of designs on on-call responsibilities, maintenance, cost, security, developer efficiency, and deployment velocity.
• Drive consensus on technical standards, architecture, and roadmap initiatives.
• Build trust with internal stakeholders and external customers by demonstrating the implementation of SRE and security practices.

Disaster Recovery:

• Contribute to business continuity plans by demonstrating how SRE practices enhance disaster recovery (DR) strategies.
• Act as an escalation point during crises, providing clear executive-level communication and engineering direction to teams.
• Ensure DR tests are scheduled and remediation tasks are completed in a timely manner.

Incident Management:

• Analyze incident trends and make recommendations for architectural, design, or operational changes that support business investments.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define priority levels and appropriate response times for products or services.
• Work closely with Product Owners and senior leadership to make critical decisions during major incidents.

Observability:

• Promote best practices in observability across technology and product teams, presenting internally and externally at conferences and webinars.
• Foster collaborative relationships with senior stakeholders and Product Owners to align on the value of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and balance feature velocity with reliability.
• Provide recommendations for changes in system designs or operating models based on performance and reliability reports.

Platforms and Automation:

• Seek engineering and architecture consensus on new standard components and services to be included in the Paved Road, such as platforms and CI/CD tools.
• Advocate for the adoption, standardization, and broader contributions through inner sourcing, with a deep understanding of its benefits to the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
• Champion the use of the Paved Road and work to eliminate inefficiencies and silos within the technology organization.

Reliability Culture:

• Evangelize SRE principles and practices across technology and product teams.
• Simplify complex reliability and security