Description

- Own features from design -> development -> testing -> deployment -> production support

- Take accountability for the reliability and performance of your services in production

- Drive technical decisions without waiting to be told what to do

System Design & Architecture

- Design scalable, resilient distributed systems handling millions of daily transactions

- Make pragmatic trade-off decisions (consistency vs. availability, complexity vs. speed)

- Produce clear technical design documents and lead design reviews

- Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with data

Development

- Strong proficiency in Java and/or Scala or TypeScript and Node.js

- Build high-throughput, low-latency microservices

- Use frameworks like NestJS, Express, or Fastify (TypeScript/Node.js - specific)

- Write clean, maintainable, type-safe code - but more importantly, know when and what to build

Testing & Quality

- Write meaningful unit, integration, and contract tests - not just for coverage metrics

- Own E2E test strategy for your services

- Build confidence in deployments through automated validation

Infrastructure & Cloud (AWS)

- Hands-on with AWS services (ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM)

- Understand networking, security, and cost implications of architectural choices

- Comfortable with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation)

Data & Messaging

- Kafka - design event-driven architectures, manage topics, handle consumer lag and rebalancing

- Redis - caching strategies, pub/sub, cluster management

- MongoDB/DocumentDB - schema design, indexing, query optimization, aggregation pipelines

- DynamoDB - single-table design, GSI/LSI strategies, capacity planning, streams (TypeScript/Node.js - specific)

Monitoring & Observability

- Datadog - build dashboards, set meaningful alerts, track SLOs, analyze APM traces

- Splunk - log analysis, search queries, correlation across services for incident investigation

- Understand distributed tracing, structured logging, and metric-driven decision making

SRE Mindset

- Analyze production incidents: read logs, trace requests, identify root cause under pressure

- Think about failure modes before they happen (circuit breakers, retries, fallbacks, graceful degradation)

- Participate in on-call rotations and drive blameless post-mortems

- Proactively identify capacity risks and performance bottlenecks

Proactive Analysis & Innovation

- Identify risks, tech debt, and performance bottlenecks before they become incidents

- Propose and drive improvements - don't wait for a ticket

- Stay current with industry trends and bring relevant ideas to the team

- Challenge existing patterns when they no longer serve the system

Key Skills

Education

Bachelor's degree