Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer, Principal Engineer Long term contract Phoenix, AZ (Hybrid-3 days onsite) Direct client- Immediate client interview Role Overview We are looking for a highly experienced Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a technical leader and go-to engineer for the SRE organization. This role will focus on improving the reliability, observability, scalability, deployment safety, and operational readiness of cloud-native applications. The ideal candidate brings a strong SRE mindset, deep production engineering experience, and the ability to identify reliability gaps, challenge existing approaches, and drive improvements across engineering teams. Role is local to Phx, or someone willing to relocate. Required Qualifications Strong Site Reliability Engineering experience supporting highly available, production-scale systems. Strong hands-on Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform) experience. Deep understanding and practical application of SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, operability, and reliability engineering principles. Strong experience with observability and instrumentation, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and production diagnostics. Experience with production troubleshooting, incident response, root-cause analysis, and operational readiness. Experience with Terraform or another Infrastructure as Code technology. Experience developing and improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment practices. Proficiency with Python, Bash, or another scripting/automation language. Ability to identify systemic reliability issues and drive engineering solutions rather than primarily responding to operational incidents. Strong technical leadership, collaboration, and communication skills across application, platform, and engineering teams. Preferred Qualifications Experience supporting Kubernetes and GKE workloads in production. Experience with GitHub Actions. Experience with Google Cloud Platform Cloud Monitoring, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, or Grafana. Experience with Istio or another service mesh. Experience with Apigee or another API gateway. Experience implementing canary, blue/green, or progressive delivery strategies. Experience improving engineering automation and automated testing practices. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with the opportunity to become a key technical authority for SRE practices across the organization.