Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Contract)

About the role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer contractor you will design, build, and maintain automated infrastructure for Newsela services. You will work closely with application developers to improve monitoring, reliability, and deployment processes across AWS and GCP environments.

Key responsibilities

• Participate in an on‑call rotation, responding to incidents that affect Newsela.com availability.
• Develop and extend infrastructure using Terraform, GitHub Actions CI/CD, Prefect, Docker, and ECS.
• Build proactive monitoring and alerting with Datadog, Sentry, and CloudWatch.
• Automate repeatable manual tasks to reduce on‑call toil.
• Improve operational processes such as deployments, releases, and migrations for fault‑tolerant operation.
• Design, implement, and maintain core cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP supporting thousands of concurrent users.
• Debug production issues across services and provide architectural guidance to development teams.
• Document architecture diagrams, runbooks, and perform root‑cause analyses.

Required profile

• Strong experience with infrastructure‑as‑code and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP).
• Ability to work autonomously, self‑organize tasks, and collaborate asynchronously.
• Excellent communication skills for cross‑team design reviews and documentation.
• Experience in agile environments using epics, issues, and OKRs.

Required skills

• Terraform
• GitHub Actions / CI‑CD
• Prefect
• AWS services (ECS, VPC, RDS, etc.)
• Google Cloud Platform
• Datadog, Sentry, CloudWatch
• Docker
• MySQL, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Redis
• Shell scripting
• Python
• SQL