Site Reliability Engineer - Reston, VA

Overview · Microsoft has an exciting opportunity for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join the Azure Silver and Sovereign Team as part of the Azure Data Transfer (ADT) team. Azure Data Transfer enables secure access and data transfer between enclaves and supports multi ...

Job description

Overview

Microsoft has an exciting opportunity for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join the Azure Silver and Sovereign Team as part of the Azure Data Transfer (ADT) team. Azure Data Transfer enables secure access and data transfer between enclaves and supports multiple transfer and access patterns for highly regulated industries. In this role, you will apply SRE principles—availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, and incident response—to help ensure ADT is dependable at scale.

We are looking for engineers to join a fast-paced team and solve complex reliability challenges in mission-critical distributed systems spanning data transmission across clouds. Our team works across all facets of isolated system engineering and is deeply involved in defining and improving service health through SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, building automation to reduce toil, strengthening observability (logs, metrics, traces), reducing systemic latency, validating and transforming data, and optimizing throughput and capacity. You will build, deploy, and operate systems that enable a broad set of Azure services to be consumed by customers in highly secured and regulated environments, meeting strict security policy and assurance requirements for public and private sector customers.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Owns reliability architecture and end-to-end service understanding (dependencies, failure modes, and customer journeys) for distributed systems at scale. Defines and improves service health via SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and well-defined operational readiness criteria. Drives cross-team reliability reviews and recommends design changes, runbooks, and safe rollout/rollback strategies that improve availability, latency, performance, and efficiency while managing cost.
• Maintains deep, current expertise in cloud reliability practices and the evolving technology landscape. Drives adoption of new platform capabilities and operational patterns (e.g., progressive delivery, resilience testing, chaos engineering where appropriate). Mentors engineers through design reviews, incident walkthroughs, and knowledge sharing to raise the reliability bar across related services.
• Implements reliable, scalable, and high-performance changes using SRE practices (progressive delivery, feature flags where applicable, safe rollouts/rollbacks). Owns implementation and rollback plans, validates operational readiness, and reduces toil through automation, self-healing, and standardized playbooks.
• Leverages telemetry and production signals to identify reliability risks and recurring failure patterns, then ships configuration changes, code fixes, or automation to address root causes. Expands infrastructure-as-code and operational tooling so teams can manage platforms and services safely and repeatably through code and policy.
• Builds and improves observability (metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts) and uses it to detect, diagnose, and prevent incidents. Defines actionable alerting, reduces noise, and ensures instrumentation supports SLO reporting and rapid troubleshooting. Develops automation to validate telemetry pipelines and to enable automated mitigation and safer incident response.
• Participates in on-call rotations and leads response for complex, high-impact incidents by establishing incident command, assessing impact, coordinating responders, and driving mitigations to restore service within SLOs. Produces and contributes to blameless postmortems with corrective and preventative actions (CPAs), tracks them to completion, and implements automation and guardrails to prevent recurrence.
• Applies secure-by-design and compliance requirements to operations, monitoring, and automation (least privilege, auditability, change control, and data handling). Partners with security, privacy, and compliance teams to identify gaps, prioritize fixes, and implement automated controls and detection to prevent repeated violations
• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required / Minimum Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

Security Clearance Requirements: Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

• The successful candidate must have an active U.S. Government Top Secret Clearance with access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) based on a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) with Polygraph. Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required pre-offer and post-hire for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate U.S. Government clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination.
• Clearance Verification: This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements. You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment.
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
• Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government Clearance

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, service engineering, or systems engineering
  
  OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems
• Experience building automation with Ansible and developing/operating CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) to deliver reliable, repeatable deployments.
• Expertise in problem solving and analyzing distributed systems and critical production service environments
• Expertise in Linux, specifically Rocky 9, Redhat, Mariner or similar in throughput management, troubleshooting and security hardening

Site Reliability Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $158,400 - $258,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process.