Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Government Cloud Operations

Description

We’re seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer with hands-on experience building and sustaining regulated cloud platforms through FedRAMP High / IL4 operational lifecycles, including continuous monitoring and post-ATO operational management.

In this critical role, you will support our growing operations, network, and systems environments. You will play a pivotal role in administering internal platforms while participating in key architectural and operational decisions. This position offers the opportunity to innovate, establish best-practice processes, and continuously improve the reliability, security, and compliance posture of our regulated cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Own production operations for mission-critical services, including availability, latency, scalability, and operational health across complex distributed systems.
• Design, build, and operate highly available cloud infrastructure supporting regulated environments, including FedRAMP High / IL4+ deployments.
• Lead major incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortem remediation; drive operational maturity through change governance, disaster recovery testing, and service resiliency programs.
• Operationalize compliance requirements, including NIST 800-53 controls and STIG baselines, across Kubernetes platforms, Linux systems, container runtimes, and cloud infrastructure.
• Support regulated environment readiness through audit preparation, evidence collection, vulnerability management, configuration management, and continuous monitoring activities.
• Develop automation and tooling to continuously assess and maintain platform compliance posture; contribute to immutable, reproducible infrastructure patterns that simplify regulatory sustainment.
• Implement and maintain secure CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices aligned with security and compliance requirements.
• Improve observability across infrastructure and applications through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting; integrate compliance telemetry and configuration auditing into operational workflows.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, and Engineering teams to improve service reliability, deployment safety, and operational maturity throughout the software lifecycle.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, Cloud Operations, or Infrastructure Engineering.
• Hands-on experience operating cloud infrastructure in regulated environments such as FedRAMP Moderate/High, DoD IL4/IL5, or equivalent, including AWS GovCloud or other isolated government cloud environments.
• Experience supporting cloud authorization efforts (ATO) and sustaining environments post-authorization through continuous monitoring, including FedRAMP monthly reporting, vulnerability tracking, and control assessment activities.
• Strong knowledge of NIST 800-53 controls, vulnerability remediation SLAs, secure configuration management, and audit evidence generation.
• Deep experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred), GitOps workflows, and secure CI/CD pipelines, including container hardening and image security practices.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash for operational automation and tooling development.
• Proficiency with cloud-native technologies including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana, along with a solid understanding of Linux/Unix operating systems.
• Experience supporting production operations for SaaS, cloud service provider, or multi-tenant platforms at scale.
• Ability to communicate operational risk and compliance posture clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working directly with 3PAOs, auditors, or compliance assessors during authorization and continuous monitoring cycles.
• Familiarity with STIG implementation across Kubernetes, Linux systems, and container runtimes.
• Understanding of Zero Trust architectures and secure access platforms.
• Experience with operational resilience exercises and disaster recovery validation.

A reasonable estimate of the total compensation for this role, at the time of posting, is $160,000 - $180,000. Cato provides a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits plan. Benefits for this role include health/vision/dental insurance, 401(k), stock options, Health Savings/Flexible Spending Accounts, flexible time-off, paid parental leave and disability benefits. 

As an EEO/Affirmative Action Employer all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status.

#LI-GG1