Site Reliability Engineer 2

Do you have a passion for high scale services and working with some of Microsoft’s most critical customers? We’re looking for a Site Reliability Engineer II with the right mix of software development, on-line services experience and passion for quality to envision, design, and deliver Office 365 government cloud service offerings.

Office 365 is at the center of Microsoft’s cloud first, devices first strategy as it brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communication and collaboration products like Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams with our cross-platform desktop suites and mobile apps. The Office 365 Enterprise Cloud team works with Microsoft’s largest enterprise and government customers to deliver features that meet their specific needs and enable cloud adoption. As you would expect, our customers have the highest expectations for feature quality, security, reliability, availability, and performance.

At Microsoft, we can offer you a solid team, exciting challenges, and a fun place to work. The work environment empowers you to have a positive impact on millions of end users. 

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team provides leadership, direction and accountability for application architecture, system design, and end-to-end implementation.

Internal CSP alignment: This role aligns to the Microsoft Career Stage Profile (CSP) for Site Reliability Engineering IC3. The role emphasizes independent execution and service ownership, using telemetry and automation to drive availability, reliability, performance, efficiency, observability, and operational improvements.

As a Site Reliability Engineer II, you will identify and deliver software improvements using your expertise in software development, complexity analysis, and scalable system design. Solid collaboration skills will be required to work closely with other engineering teams to ensure services/systems are highly stable and performant, meeting the expectations of our government customers and users. 

At Microsoft, our mission—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress—people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.   

Technical Knowledge and Domain-Specific Expertise

• Demonstrates expertise in distributed systems design, interactions between cloud technology layers and components, common dependencies at scale, and the code that defines infrastructures. Can identify and recommend configurations optimal of cloud technology solutions and modify the code base that defines systems or cloud technologies to improve the reliability and operability of supported products with minimal guidance from other engineers.
• Develops an understanding of the code, features, and operations of specific products at scale as required to contribute to incremental improvements in product availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and/or performance; participates in on-boarding, code/design reviews, and regular meetings with the engineering teams that develop and/or manage those products.
• Researches and maintains an awareness in industry trends, advances in distributed systems and cloud technologies, new tools, and/or processes for maintaining and improving product availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and/or performance. Contributes to the implementation of new solutions within their team by identifying ways they can be applied to solve persistent problems.

Contributions to Development and Design

• Leverages technical expertise in large scale distributed systems and specific products, as well as objective insights drawn from analyses of production telemetry data to suggest changes or add-ons to product features or code to improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of product components or features supported by their team.
• Develops and tests basic changes to optimize code and improve the observability, reliability and operability of a defined range of platform, system, or product components or features with direction from other engineers.
• Engages with product engineering teams by participating code/design reviews, regular meetings, on-call rotations and incident responses throughout product development and operations cycles; leverages technical expertise on underlying systems/platforms and insights drawn from engagements with product engineering teams and telemetry analyses to propose potential improvements in code base and designs across components and features of one or more products.

Driving Operational Excellence

• Independently develops code or scripts that automate the performance of repetitive and easily scalable operations processes (e.g., monitoring, alerting, deploying products and updates) across components and features of products operating at scale.
• Leverages technical expertise and telemetry analysis across a range of components and/or features to identify patterns and opportunities to implement configuration and data changes for one or more platforms, systems, or products in production using code, tooling, and automation.
• Identifies opportunities to leverage existing tools and automation to enable product engineering teams to increase the velocity in which they can reliably and safely implement changes in production; monitors the effects of changes across multiple components or features within a single platform or system.
• Designs, develops, and maintains telemetry pipelines and monitoring tools that detail operations metrics (e.g., availability, reliability, performance, efficiency) of product components and features operating at scale. Independently performs analyses using existing tools and/or models to identify insights and shares them with product engineering teams to directly contribute to improvements in product development and/or operations; monitors the impact of changes on operations metrics (e.g., Time-to-X).
• Independently uses existing tools and/or models to troubleshoot problems or flaws affecting the availability, reliability, performance, and/or efficiency of components and features; proposes solutions that will resolve and prevent recurring issues and brings them to the attention of their Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and/or product engineering teams.
• Responds to incidents during regular on-call rotations by identifying the level of impact, troubleshooting issues, and deploying appropriate fixes to resolve root cause(s); alerts product teams and owners to major customer impacting issues and escalates resolution of highly impactful issues affecting multiple components or features to other engineers or engineering teams as needed. Shares details related to incidents and their resolution through post-mortem reports and during regular review meetings.
• Develops alerts and instrumentation across components and features to monitor product capacity and resource demands and analyze telemetry data using existing capacity planning models; draws insights from analyses of capacity and resource data to optimize component and feature code to manage resources and capacity across limited range of use conditions and system parameters.
• Utilizes insights from performance and resource monitoring tools to identify whether there is a need to optimize the efficiency of component and feature code, or if changes to compute resources are required; models the predicted effect of changes to code and/or compute resources across components or features to document the efficacy of proposed solutions.
• Shares insights and Preferred practices that can be applied to improve development and operations of system, platform, or product components and features by participating in code/design reviews, incident drills and debriefs, and regular meetings, as well as interactions with more experienced SREs and members of product engineering teams.

Additional Duties

• Design, develop, and deliver the required software engineering to serve and protect O365 government clouds.
• Own deployment, availability, reliability, performance and customer escalation targets for sovereign environments.  
• Proactively identify and reduce issues through design, testing, and implementation of software-based solutions.  
• Collaborate with Engineering and Program Management partners to translate customer, business, and technical requirements into architectural designs and feature releases.  
• Drive efficiencies through software improvement and root cause analysis resulting in service delivery, maturity, and scalability.  
• Work within a highly skilled team of engineers to deliver revolutionary improvements to the cloud and scale them.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 5+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.