[Hiring] Lead Site Reliability Engineer @Akka

Role Description

Akka Platform is a cloud-native PaaS that enables teams to build and operate AI-enhanced microservices at scale. The Lead SRE owns reliability, scalability, and security for a multi-tenant platform running customer workloads across EKS, GKE, and AKS.

• Own Service Level Objectives/Service Level Indicators (SLOs/SLIs) and error budgets across multi-cloud clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS); drive blameless post-mortems and systemic remediation.
• Lead capacity planning with our customers, cluster lifecycle management, and Kubernetes and database upgrade cycles.
• Define and enforce runbooks, on-call rotations, and escalation paths for the wider engineering organisation.

• Own and evolve the IaC layer: Helm charts, Crossplane compositions, and FluxCD GitOps pipelines.
• Design and maintain cloud-resource provisioning workflows that span all three cloud providers, with consistent policy controls.

• Architect and operate connectivity patterns: AWS PrivateLink / Transit Gateway, GCP NCC, Azure VNet Peering, and cross-region ingress with Contour/Envoy.
• Maintain and evolve the Linkerd service mesh for mTLS, workload identity (OIDC), and zero-trust authorisation policies.
• Drive PKI hygiene with cert-manager: root/intermediate CA rotation, ACME certificate lifecycle, and secret management via KMS-backed Kubernetes vaults.

• Own the observability stack: Prometheus, Cortex (multi-tenant metrics), OpenTelemetry sidecars, centralised log pipelines, and Groundcover / Grafana dashboards.
• Establish alerting standards and SLO-based alerting rules; ensure distributed traces are actionable across JVM, Rust, and Go workloads.
• Actively participate in on-call and lead the technical response for platform-level incidents.

• Set engineering standards and review infrastructure changes across the team.
• Partner with Security, Product, and Application Engineering to translate reliability requirements into platform capabilities.
• Grow a team of 3–5 SREs through code review, architecture sessions, and career conversations.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in SRE, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering roles.
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience: operating and scaling clusters across at least two of GKE, EKS, and AKS in production.
• Proven IaC ownership: Helm chart authoring, Crossplane provider/composition design, and GitOps with Flux or ArgoCD.
• Strong multi-cloud networking: VPC design, private connectivity (PrivateLink, NCC, VNet Peering), and DNS (Route 53, Cloud DNS, Azure DNS, Cloudflare).
• Production experience with a service mesh (Linkerd or Istio) and Envoy-based ingress.
• Solid observability track record with Prometheus, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), and structured logging pipelines.
• Experience securing Kubernetes clusters: RBAC, workload identity / OIDC, mTLS, and secret management with cloud KMS.
• Comfortable reading and writing at least one systems language (Go, Rust, or similar) and shell scripting for automation and operator development.

Requirements

• Experience writing Kubernetes Operators / custom controllers (Go preferred).
• Familiarity with JVM workloads on Kubernetes – GC tuning, heap sizing, graceful shutdown.
• Exposure to event-driven / event-sourcing architectures (Akka, Kafka, or similar).
• Experience with Teleport for federated cluster access.
• Background operating Cortex for long-term, multi-tenant metrics storage.
• Knowledge of gRPC service design and debugging.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity, benchmarked against senior/lead IC roles in your market.
• Remote-first culture with flexible working hours.
• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits.
• Opportunities for professional development and continuous learning.
• Collaborative, inclusive, and innovative company culture.
• A team that has strong opinions, writes good documentation, and builds things they are proud of.