Senior Reliability Engineer – Platform Engineering

Job Title: Senior Reliability Engineer – Platform EngineeringPosition Type: Direct PlacementIndustry: Financial ServicesLocation: Chicago, IL (Hybrid - 2 Days Onsite/Week in Downtown Chicago)Work Authorization: Open to candidates authorized to work in the USAbout the RoleWe are seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Platform Engineering) to serve as the foundational Technical Lead for a premier global Financial Services enterprise. In this role, you will be the primary architect and visionary for core technology foundations that underpin high-volume, ultra-low latency financial marketplaces.You will bridge the gap between high-level business strategy and deep technical implementation, ensuring our GCP-native stack provides mission-critical reliability, extreme scalability, and operational excellence. Your goal is to evolve the platform from "Infrastructure as a Service" to "Reliability as a Product."Key ResponsibilitiesTechnical Vision & Strategy: Define and execute the 12–18 month technical roadmap for the Platform SRE ecosystem, building high-level Internal Development Platform (IDP) abstractions in Python.Architectural Leadership: Serve as the final technical authority for core infrastructure architectures spanning GCP, GKE, and enterprise-grade Kafka messaging clusters.Incident Command & Resilience: Lead response strategies for complex, cross-functional outages; foster a blameless engineering culture focused on code-driven, automated resiliency.Reliability Governance: Standardize and enforce SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets across all engineering pods to safeguard system integrity.GenAI & Intelligent Ops: Leverage Generative AI and Agentic workflows (e.g., Gemini) to build self-healing infrastructure and automated root-cause analysis frameworks.Engineering Mentorship: Elevate the global SRE organization through architectural office hours, design reviews, and engineering best practices.Required QualificationsExperience: 10+ years in SRE, Infrastructure, or Software Engineering roles in high-concurrency, high-availability environments.Leadership: 3+ years in a Staff, Principal, or Tech Lead capacity overseeing complex platform engineering domains.Cloud Native Mastery: Expertise in GCP (Networking, IAM, GKE) and scaling Kafka event buses for low-latency operations.Software Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in Python (and ideally Go) for writing production-grade distributed systems and custom Kubernetes operators.IaC & GitOps: Hands-on mastery of Terraform module design and GitOps patterns via ArgoCD.Location: Chicago-based or willing to relocate to Chicago (hybrid schedule requiring 2 days/week on-site).Nice to HavePrior experience in Financial Markets, High-Frequency Trading (HFT), or heavily regulated financial ecosystems.GCP Professional Cloud Architect or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA/CKAD).Full-Stack exposure (Node.js or modern web frameworks).