Principal Site Reliability Engineer (Fastly, Cloudflare/Akamai)

About the role:

The Gartner SRE team's mission is to deliver reliable, scalable, secure, and high-performing digital platforms that power Gartner's business and elevate customer experiences through a culture of reliability, innovation, and continuous improvement.

We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to serve as senior technical leader responsible for advancing the reliability, resilience, performance, automation, and governance of Gartner's digital platforms. With a focus on global CDN and edge delivery capabilities, you will shape platform architecture, establish engineering standards, and drive cross-functional initiatives that improve operational maturity, accelerate delivery, and ensure exceptional customer experiences.
 

What you will do:

• Deliver world-class availability, stability, and performance for our digital products, ensuring a consistent and positive user experience for customers.

• Establish multi-CDN architecture patterns, traffic-steering strategies, failover mechanisms, and operational standards to achieve five-nines (99.999%) availability targets.

• Lead CDN incident response, disaster recovery exercises, capacity planning, and performance optimization initiatives to ensure uninterrupted customer experiences during internet-scale events.

• Partner with Security, Infrastructure, and Application Development teams to implement and optimize edge security capabilities including DDoS protection, WAF policies, bot management, and edge compute services.

• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions to manage CDN configurations, governance policies, observability, WAF rules, and deployment processes.

• Design, build, and maintain global traffic management policies, including DNS routing, certificate management, and load balancing, to meet disaster recovery (DR) and high-availability (HA) requirements.

• Design and implement edge-computing solutions using Cloudflare Workers, Lambda@Edge, or equivalent technologies to address key application use cases.

• Define and monitor CDN-specific SLOs, SLIs, and KPIs including cache hit ratio, origin offload, latency, availability, and traffic distribution across providers.

• Identify opportunities to improve the performance, scalability, and stability of applications across the full technology stack.

• Participate in operational support and on-call rotations to provide timely incident response for supported systems and applications.

• Lead production incident resolution efforts, triage application and system issues, identify root causes, and implement remediation measures to restore services quickly.

• Develop alerting strategies, dashboards, and reporting frameworks to communicate operational and business critical metrics.

• Identify opportunities to automate manual operational work (i.e., “toil”) using pipelines, new software, or any other appropriate mechanisms.

• Drive system design consulting, platform management, capacity planning, and launch reviews. • Partner with application teams to design and implement chaos engineering practices that improve resilience and fault tolerance.

• Establish strong relationships with development teams, product owners, and other stakeholders to define and manage Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

• Manage, collaborate and share lessons learned regarding CDN architecture and deployments with all stakeholders, including developers, other SREs, operations teams, and project management teams.

• Improve customer experience and increase product value by enhancing the reliability, availability, and performance of client-facing applications and service

• Internal relationships are critical to establish with application development teams and technology teams such as database, cloud/infrastructure, and enterprise architecture. 
   

What you will need:

Must Have

• Expert knowledge of one or two enterprise CDN platforms, including Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront, Akamai, or equivalent technologies, with hands-on experience designing, operating, and optimizing multi-CDN environments.

• Experience implementing multi-CDN routing and failover solutions using DNS, GSLB, traffic management platforms, or real-user-performance (RUM) driven traffic steering.

• Experience in managing large-scale CDN platforms using Terraform/OpenTofu, CI/CD pipelines, or provider specific automation frameworks such as Fastly VCL, Cloudflare APIs or equivalent.

• Experience with CI/CD pipeline governance, code promotions, and Infrastructure-as-Code best practices to enable consistent, automated deployments across environments.

• Expertise in CDN observability, performance analytics, log analysis, and troubleshooting user experience issues across global regions and internet service providers.

• Strong understanding of edge security services including WAF, bot mitigation, DDoS protection, rate limiting, and zero-trust access controls.

• Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, coupled with strong verbal and written communication capabilities.

Good To have:

• Demonstrated ability to adapt to changing priorities and technologies, with a strong commitment to continuous learning and professional development.

• Experience in collaborating with Development, Cloud and Architecture teams or other relevant teams to conduct RCA, drive mission critical initiatives

• Experience building Cloudflare Workers and snippets, AWS Lambda@Edge functions, Fastly VCL, and Fastly Compute solutions.

• Experience with client-side technologies such as NodeJS, JavaScript, React JQuery and utilizing CDN features to improve UI performance

• Hands-on experience creating ACM certificates in Fastly, Cloudflare, or AWS.

• Exposure with monitoring tools like Splunk, Grafana and APM tools such as Dynatrace, or equivalent

• Proficient in Operating Systems (UNIX/Linux) & networking concepts.

• Exposure to Performance & chaos Engineering concepts

Who you are :

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or related discipline, or equivalent work experience.

• 8+ years of information technology experience with 6+ years working on DevOps/SRE team or similar with focus on CDN.

• Knowledge of Agile approaches to software development and ability to put key Agile principles into practice to deliver solutions incrementally.

• Excellent analytical thinking, interpersonal, oral, and written communication skills with strong ability to influence both IT and business partners.

• Ability to prioritize and manage work to critical project timelines in a fast-paced environment.

• Demonstrated experience in people management, team leadership, and fostering a positive team culture.

Don’t meet every single requirement? We encourage you to apply anyway. You might just be the right candidate for this, or other roles.
#LI-NS4

Who are we?

At Gartner, Inc. (NYSE:IT), we guide the leaders who shape the world.

Our mission relies on expert analysis and bold ideas to deliver actionable, objective business and technology insights, helping enterprise leaders and their teams succeed with their mission-critical priorities.

Since our founding in 1979, we’ve grown to 20,000 associates globally who support over 13,000 client enterprises in ~90 countries and territories. We do important, interesting and substantive work that matters. That’s why we hire associates with the intellectual curiosity, energy and drive to want to make a difference. The bar is unapologetically high. So is the impact you can have here.

What makes Gartner a great place to work?

Our vast, virtually untapped market potential offers limitless opportunities – opportunities that may not even exist right now – for you to grow professionally and flourish personally. How far you go is driven by your passion and performance.

We hire remarkable people who collaborate and win as a team. Together, our singular, unifying goal is to deliver results for our clients.

Our teams are inclusive and composed of individuals from different geographies, cultures, religions, ethnicities, races, genders, sexual orientations, abilities and generations.

We invest in great leaders who bring out the best in you and the company, enabling us to multiply our impact and results. This is why, year after year, we are recognized worldwide as a great place to work.

Gartner is the world authority on AI

At Gartner, you’ll join a company at the very center of the AI revolution. Gartner has proactive, objective guidance throughout clients’ AI journeys. We set the standard for how organizations leverage artificial intelligence to drive meaningful impact. You’ll have access to unmatched resources, expertise, and technology, and play a key role in helping Gartner and our clients innovate and grow as we leverage AI to transform business and technology landscapes.

It’s an exciting time to be at Gartner, with limitless opportunities to make a real impact, grow your skills, and build a lasting, meaningful career in a field that’s reshaping the way we operate. If you’re passionate about AI and want to be part of a team that’s guiding the leaders who shape the world, Gartner is the place for you.

What do we offer?

Gartner offers world-class benefits, highly competitive compensation and disproportionate rewards for top performers.

In our hybrid work environment, we provide the flexibility and support for you to thrive — working virtually when it's productive to do so and getting together with colleagues in a vibrant community that is purposeful, engaging and inspiring.

Ready to grow your career with Gartner? Join us.

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