Senior Reliability Engineer Jobs in Silver Spring, MD

Cooley is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join the Infrastructure & Development Operationsteam.

Position summary: The Senior Technology Site Reliability Engineer("SRE") is responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of the firm's critical infrastructure and applications. The SREblends software engineering with systems engineering to build and maintain automated, resilient, and observable systems that support high availability and operational excellence. In addition to being technically advanced, the SRE will have a high degree of emotional intelligence and the ability to work as a team towards complex and layered objectives. Specific duties and responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

Position responsibilities:

• Monitor and maintain production systems to ensure high availability and performance
• Implement and manage service-level indicators (SLIs), objectives (SLO's), agreements (SLA's), and error budgets
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response, including root cause analysis and postmortems
• Develop and maintain infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform
• Automate deployment, scaling, and recovery processes to reduce manual intervention
• Partner with DevOps to build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support safe and efficient software delivery
• Implement observability solutions using metrics, logs, traces, and alerting systems (Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog, etc.)
• Proactively identify and resolve system bottlenecks and reliability risks
• Work closely with Infrastructure, DevOps, Development, and security teams to embed reliability into the development lifecycle
• Contribute to a culture of blameless post-mortems and continuous improvement
• Document operational procedures and share knowledge across teams
• All other duties as assigned or required

Skills and experience:

Required:

• After orientation at Cooley LLP, exhibit proficiency in the Microsoft Office suite, iManage and other firm applications
• Ability to work extended and/or weekend hours, as required
• Ability to travel, as required
• 6+ years direct applicable experience (e.g. site reliability engineering or related field)
• Proficiency in Terraform and programming languages such as Python, Go, or Java
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms, particularly AWS, and container orchestration
• Strong background in distributed systems, performance tuning, and automation
• Hands-on experience with configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, or Salt

Preferred:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or associated discipline
• Experience working with advanced ETL data workflows including technologies such as AWS EMR, Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory, or Apache Hive/Spark/Airflow
• Experience with IaC deployment of AKS/EKS/GKE architecture
• Experience with enterprise Data Lake environments using technologies such as DataBricks or Snowflake

Competencies:

• Expert analytical/quantitative, problem-solving, and deductive reasoning skills, experience performing advanced troubleshooting and root cause analysis of complex technical issues
• Excellent organizational, planning, and time management skills and ability to work independently and in a team environment to manage competing priorities and meet deadlines
• Advanced verbal and written communication skills with the ability to present findings, conclusions, alternatives, and information clearly and concisely
• Experience working with all levels of business professionals, management, stakeholders, and vendors with the ability to build effective relationships through trust and diplomacy

Cooley offers a competitive compensation and excellent benefits package and is committed to fair and equitable employment practices.

EOE.

The expected annual pay range for this position with a full-time schedule is $140,000 - $205,000. Please note that final offer amount will be dependent on geographic location, applicable experience and skillset of the candidate.

We offer a full range of elective benefits including medical, health savings account (with applicable medical plan), dental, vision, health and/or dependent care flexible spending accounts, pre-tax commuter benefits, life insurance, AD&D, long-term care coverage, backup care for children and/or adults and other parental support benefits. In addition to elective benefit options, benefited employees receive firm-paid life insurance, AD&D, LTD, short term medical benefits as well as 21 days of Paid Time Off ("PTO") and 10 paid holidays each year. We provide generous parental leave and fertility benefits. New employees will attend a detailed benefit orientation to learn more about our many benefits and resources.