SRE (Infrastructure) Lead Engineer

Current Platform State

We operate a production platform supporting:

 

• Retail robotics SaaS services and internal operations tools.
• Kubernetes-based application workloads across development, staging, infrastructure, and production environments.
• Robot, smart shelf, and store operations systems that depend on reliable cloud-to-edge communication.
• GitOps-style Kubernetes manifests and environment overlays.
• Infrastructure as Code using Azure Bicep, Terraform, and Terragrunt.
• CI/CD automation with GitHub Actions, including cloud authentication through OIDC.
• Observability through Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, Grafana, Loki, Alloy, and alerting workflows.

 

You will inherit systems that are already running and help evolve them into a more standardized, automated, and resilient platform.

Tech Stack

• Cloud: Microsoft Azure today; AWS or GCP experience is also welcome if paired with strong cloud fundamentals
• Compute & Runtime: AKS, Kubernetes, Docker, App Service, Functions
• Infrastructure as Code: Azure Bicep, Terraform, Terragrunt
• GitOps & Manifests: Argo CD, Kustomize, Helm, Kubernetes YAML
• Networking & Ingress: VNet, subnets, NSG, load balancers, Traefik, ingress-nginx, cert-manager, TLS
• Identity & Security: Microsoft Entra ID, Azure RBAC, workload identity, managed identities, Key Vault, GitHub Actions OIDC
• Data & Storage: Azure Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, Redis / Redis Enterprise, Blob Storage, Storage Accounts
• Observability: Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, Grafana, Loki, Alloy, Prometheus-compatible metrics, scheduled query alerts
• Languages & Scripting: Bash, Python, TypeScript, C# or similar production scripting/application languages
• Development Tools: Git/GitHub, GitHub Actions, Azure CLI, kubectl, Helm, Argo CD CLI

Why This Role Matters

• Production reliability: our store operations, robot workflows, and customer systems depend on stable infrastructure.
• Hands-on platform evolution: this role improves running systems through code, automation, standards, and direct operation.
• Cloud-edge complexity: our platform connects cloud services, Kubernetes workloads, store systems, robots, smart shelves, and telemetry flows.
• High business impact: reliability, deployment quality, and cost control directly affect operational efficiency and customer trust.
• Team leadership: you will shape the practices, rituals, and technical judgment of a small Infra/SRE team.
• Standardization opportunity: we are actively improving IaC ownership, environment separation, observability, incident response, and deployment guardrails.

Key Responsibilities

Reliability & Operations
• Own reliability practices for production cloud and Kubernetes systems, including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, alert quality, and operational readiness.
• Lead incident response for infrastructure-related outages, act as Incident Commander when needed, and drive blameless post-incident reviews.
• Build and maintain runbooks, dashboards, alerts, and operational tooling that help engineers diagnose and recover systems quickly.
• Improve backup, restore, disaster recovery, and business continuity practices for critical compute, data, storage, and configuration systems.
• Identify recurring operational pain and remove it through automation, better design, or clearer ownership.
Infrastructure & Platform Engineering
• Design, operate, and improve Kubernetes environments, including AKS clusters, workload scheduling, autoscaling, ingress, TLS, RBAC, and cluster upgrades.
• Maintain and evolve Infrastructure as Code using Bicep, Terraform, and Terragrunt across development, staging, infrastructure, and production environments.
• Own GitOps-style application deployment patterns using Argo CD, Kustomize, Helm, and environment overlays.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines with safe promotion flows, validation, drift detection, security checks, and rollback strategies.
• Manage cloud networking, identity, secrets, certificates, and access controls in partnership with Security Engineering.
• Support application teams with platform guidance for resource requests, scaling, dependency management, release safety, and production readiness.
Observability, Security, and Cost
• Standardize logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts across services and infrastructure.
• Operate and improve observability tooling such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, Grafana, Loki, Alloy, and scheduled query alerts.
• Partner with Security Engineering on RBAC, workload identity, managed identities, Key Vault usage, secret rotation, cloud access boundaries, and auditability.
• Drive cloud cost visibility and optimization through tagging, right-sizing, autoscaling, log retention controls, budget review, and FinOps practices.
• Keep reliability, security, and cost decisions practical for a growing robotics business.
Team Leadership
• Lead and mentor 3-6 Infra/SRE/Platform engineers while staying deeply hands-on.
• Set technical direction for infrastructure reliability, deployment automation, observability, and cloud operations.
• Run design reviews, code reviews, operational reviews, and regular improvement planning.
• Build healthy on-call practices, escalation paths, incident roles, and postmortem follow-through.
• Communicate priorities, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to engineering leadership and cross-functional partners.
Cross-Team Collaboration
• Work with Backend and Frontend teams to make services easier to deploy, observe, scale, and operate.
• Work with Robotics and Operations teams to understand how infrastructure behavior affects live robot and store workflows.
• Work with Product and Engineering Management to translate non-functional requirements into roadmap items and engineering guardrails.
• Help teams adopt standard platform patterns without blocking delivery.

Qualifications

Must Have
• 5+ years of professional infrastructure, platform, SRE, DevOps, backend infrastructure, or cloud engineering experience.
• 2+ years in a senior, lead, or technical leadership role with responsibility for production reliability or infrastructure direction.
• Strong hands-on experience operating production systems on at least one major cloud platform such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• Production Kubernetes experience, including deployments, services, ingress, autoscaling, resource management, RBAC, troubleshooting, and upgrades.
• Hands-on Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Pulumi, CDK, or similar tools.
• Experience designing or operating CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows for production services.
• Strong Linux, networking, DNS, TLS, and cloud identity fundamentals.
• Practical observability experience with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, and incident response.
• Experience leading incidents, writing postmortems, and driving corrective actions to completion.
• Ability to write scripts or small tools in Bash, Python, TypeScript, Go, C#, or a comparable language.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to work across engineering, operations, security, and product teams.
Nice to Have
• Azure production experience, especially AKS, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, Key Vault, Entra ID, managed identities, and Azure RBAC.
• Experience with Argo CD, Kustomize, Helm, cert-manager, Traefik, ingress-nginx, Grafana, Loki, Alloy, or Prometheus-style monitoring.
• Experience with GitHub Actions OIDC, workload identity, or federated cloud authentication patterns.
• Experience operating data services such as PostgreSQL, Redis, Cosmos DB, MongoDB-compatible databases, or cloud storage systems.
• Experience with drift detection, policy-as-code, cloud guardrails, or compliance-oriented infrastructure workflows.
• Background in robotics, IoT, retail operations, edge computing, telemetry systems, or other cyber-physical production environments.
• Experience building or improving an on-call program for a growing engineering organization.
• Japanese language skills are helpful but not required.

Success Profile

• Hands-on operator: comfortable debugging real incidents, reading manifests, reviewing Terraform/Bicep, and using cloud/Kubernetes CLIs directly.
• Reliability-minded: thinks in SLOs, failure modes, blast radius, recovery paths, and operational feedback loops.
• Pragmatic leader: balances engineering quality with business urgency and team capacity.
• Automation-oriented: turns repeated manual work into durable tools, workflows, or platform patterns.
• Security-aware: treats access, secrets, identity, network boundaries, and auditability as part of daily infrastructure work.
• Cost-conscious: understands that cloud architecture must be reliable and financially sustainable.
• Collaborative teacher: raises the operational maturity of surrounding teams through guidance, reviews, and shared standards.

Vision & Growth

• Build a stronger SRE and platform engineering practice for retail robotics.
• Standardize infrastructure ownership across cloud resources, Kubernetes clusters, manifests, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Help scale the platform from today’s operational needs toward enterprise-grade reliability across more stores, robots, smart shelves, and customer environments.
• Shape the long-term infrastructure roadmap while remaining close to the systems that keep the business running.