Contract Azure Site Reliability Engineer

Contract Azure Senior Site Reliability Engineer

💰 Open hourly rate

📅 6-month contract - 40 hours per week

📍 Onsite in El Segundo, CA

A space & defense company is hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to own the infrastructure behind its ground systems and the embedded software running on its spacecraft through a 6-month engagement. The platform is Kubernetes-based, defined in Terraform, and treated as mission-critical.

The systems are live, the vehicles are flying. What's needed is an operator and builder who has run Kubernetes in production before, can pick up an existing IaC estate without a long runway, and can carry it from where it is now to something more observable, more automated and more resilient on a fixed clock.

🔧 What you'll be doing

• Deploy, maintain and operate mission-critical applications and infrastructure supporting spacecraft and company-wide systems
• Build and evolve Infrastructure as Code frameworks in Terraform
• Implement and run observability (metrics, logging, tracing) with alerting that people act on
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for safe, repeatable, rapid deployments
• Partner with software and hardware engineers so they have the tooling to iterate quickly
• Find and fix bottlenecks and reliability risks; tune performance and land long-term stability improvements
• Respond to production incidents, run root cause analysis and drive corrective actions through blameless postmortems
• Take your turn on the on-call rotation

✅ What you'll need

• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform (or similar) for provisioning and configuration management
• Kubernetes
• Prometheus, Grafana, InfluxDB or similar
• Azure
• GitOps - ArgoCD, Ansible, Salt
• Docker
• HPC and GPU workloads — Slurm queue/partition design, fair-share scheduling, cluster resource management
• Hybrid cloud + on-prem/edge environments, and debugging distributed systems at scale
• Prior contract or independent consulting work, you land and add value fast

📩 Interested? Click apply with an updated copy of your resume. I'll come back to you within 48 hours. If you don't hear back within 48 hours, please assume you haven't been successful on this occasion.