Site Reliability Engineer - Tech Lead

Job Title: SRE Tech Lead

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Work Model: Onsite

Salary: $600k - $800k

A high-performing trading technology firm is seeking an SRE Tech Lead to lead reliability, scalability, and operational excellence across critical production systems. The role is suited to a hands-on technical leader who can operate across infrastructure, software, and platform engineering while setting a high bar for resilience, automation, and engineering quality.

The SRE Tech Lead will work closely with software engineering, platform, security, and infrastructure teams to improve service availability, strengthen observability, and drive scalable operational practices. The successful individual will bring strong technical depth, sound production judgment, and the ability to influence engineering teams in demanding, high-scale environments, including candidates currently working in FAANG or similarly elite technology.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, performance, and availability of business-critical production services and infrastructure.
• Lead incident response, service restoration, root cause analysis, and post-incident review processes across complex environments.
• Define and implement SRE best practices, including service health standards, monitoring strategy, alerting frameworks, and operational readiness controls.
• Drive automation initiatives that reduce operational toil and improve deployment consistency, recovery capability, and platform scalability.
• Partner with software and infrastructure teams to improve system design, fault tolerance, capacity planning, and production resilience.
• Oversee production readiness for new services, platform changes, and infrastructure improvements before release into live environments.
• Champion a reliability-first engineering culture through measurable standards, strong operational discipline, and continuous service improvement.
• Mentor engineers and act as a senior technical point of contact for reliability, infrastructure, and platform-related challenges.

Requirements

• Strong hands-on experient operating and troubleshooting Linux-based production environments.
• Good understanding of streaming platform architecture and distributed systems design principles.
• Experience working with messaging and event-driven platforms such as Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or comparable queueing technologies.
• Working knowledge of systems programming languages such as Rust, C, or C++.
• Familiarity with large-scale data environments, including columnar databases, distributed data stores, and time-series platforms such as Bigtable, ClickHouse, or Cassandra.
• Experience using source control, build automation, and continuous integration / continuous deployment tooling as part of a modern engineering workflow.
• Strong understanding of application deployment lifecycle management, including CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, and containerized environments.
• Proven ability to solve complex infrastructure and platform reliability challenges in high-availability production settings.

Preferred Profile

• Background in a FAANG or similarly high-scale, engineering-led environment where reliability, automation, and operational rigor are central to product delivery.
• Experience supporting distributed systems or platform infrastructure with demanding uptime, performance, and resilience requirements.
• Track record of improving automation, deployment standards, production stability, and engineering maturity across modern infrastructure estates.
• Ability to lead from the front technically while also influencing stakeholders, mentoring engineers, and helping shape long-term platform reliability strategy.

This opportunity offers the chance to shape reliability strategy from a visible leadership position while remaining close to architecture, production systems, and engineering delivery. It is well suited to candidates coming from FAANG or comparable environments who want to bring world-class reliability, automation, and infrastructure standards into a role with meaningful ownership and impact.

Apply now for a confidential conversation.