What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Observability position at Dimensional Fund Advisors?
Job Description
About the Role:
We are looking for a Senior SRE to join our Platform Engineering team as the operations owner of our observability platforms. You’ll be responsible for the reliability, scalability, and continued evolution of the tools that give our engineering organization visibility into everything they build and run. The current observability platform is primarily comprised of on-premises ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) Stack and Grafana, with some exposure to New Relic and SolarWinds.
This is a hybrid role: roughly half your time will be spent on steady-state operations and platform support, and the other half on engineering projects that meaningfully advance the platforms you support. It’s a great fit for someone who is genuinely motivated by the pursuit of excellence – not just sustaining what works but relentlessly refining it. You take pride in the platforms you own, and that pride drives you to keep improving them, whether that means tightening an SLO, eliminating a source of toil, or building something that gives teams faster insight into their systems.
What You’ll Work On
Operations & Reliability (~ 50%)
It is the policy of the Company to provide equal opportunity for all employees and applicants. The Company recruits, hires, trains, promotes, compensates, and administers all personnel actions without regard to actual or perceived race, color, religion, religious practice, creed, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy (which includes pregnancy, childbirth, and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding), caregiver status, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender identity, national origin, age, mental or physical disability, ancestry, medical condition, marital status, familial status, domestic partnership status, military or veteran status or service, unemployment status, citizenship status or alienage, sexual orientation, status as a victim of domestic violence, status as a victim of stalking, status as a victim of sex offenses, genetic information, political activities or recreational activities, arrest or conviction record, salary history, natural hairstyle or any other status protected by applicable law except as otherwise required or permitted by law or regulation applicable to the Company or its affiliates.
About the Role:
We are looking for a Senior SRE to join our Platform Engineering team as the operations owner of our observability platforms. You’ll be responsible for the reliability, scalability, and continued evolution of the tools that give our engineering organization visibility into everything they build and run. The current observability platform is primarily comprised of on-premises ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) Stack and Grafana, with some exposure to New Relic and SolarWinds.
This is a hybrid role: roughly half your time will be spent on steady-state operations and platform support, and the other half on engineering projects that meaningfully advance the platforms you support. It’s a great fit for someone who is genuinely motivated by the pursuit of excellence – not just sustaining what works but relentlessly refining it. You take pride in the platforms you own, and that pride drives you to keep improving them, whether that means tightening an SLO, eliminating a source of toil, or building something that gives teams faster insight into their systems.
What You’ll Work On
Operations & Reliability (~ 50%)
- Serve as a primary escalation point for production support involving the ELK Stack, Grafana, and New Relic
- Own platform health, capacity planning, and performance tuning for on-premises observability infrastructure – including Elasticsearch cluster management, index lifecycle policies, and retention strategies
- Monitor and maintain SLOs for the observability platforms, ensuring the tools engineers depend on are highly available and performant
- Support engineering teams in onboarding to observability platforms – helping teams instrument their applications, build dashboards, and define meaningful alerts
- Manage patching, upgrades, and configuration management across the observability stack
- Collaborate with security to harden platform configurations and manage software vulnerabilities
- Contribute to on-call rotations and maintain runbooks and escalation procedures
- Design and build tooling/automation to reduce toil and improve the experience for teams using observability platforms
- Lead or contribute to platform modernization initiatives – e.g., improving ingestion pipelines, scaling platform capacity, standardizing Grafana dashboard and alerting patterns, or evaluating new capabilities within the existing stack
- Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm, Ansible, etc.) for platform components
- Build and enforce standards around logging metrics and alerting that help engineering teams adopt observability best practices at scale
- Participate in design reviews and contribute to the overall platform roadmap
- Bachelor’s degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience
- 5 years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering roles
- Deep hands-on experience with the ELK Stack – Elasticsearch cluster operations, Logstash pipeline development, Kibana, and index lifecycle management
- Strong experience with Grafana, including data source integrations, dashboard design, and alerting
- Solid understanding of observability principles
- Experience operating on-premises infrastructure, including capacity planning, server management, and the operational tradeoffs with managed cloud services
- Proficiency in Python for automation and tooling; familiarity with shell scripting
- Strong Linux systems knowledge and comfort working with configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc.)
- Demonstrated ability to drive incidents to resolution and communicate clearly under pressure
- A bias toward automation and a low tolerance for repetitive manual work
- Experience with Prometheus
- Experience with New Relic administration or APM instrumentation
- Familiarity with log shipping agents and pipeline tools such as Beats, Fluentd, or Fluent Bit
- Experience with distributed tracing tools like OpenTelemetry
- Exposure to cloud-based observability offerings and experience thinking through hybrid strategies
- Prior experience building or governing observability standards across a large engineering organization
It is the policy of the Company to provide equal opportunity for all employees and applicants. The Company recruits, hires, trains, promotes, compensates, and administers all personnel actions without regard to actual or perceived race, color, religion, religious practice, creed, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy (which includes pregnancy, childbirth, and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding), caregiver status, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender identity, national origin, age, mental or physical disability, ancestry, medical condition, marital status, familial status, domestic partnership status, military or veteran status or service, unemployment status, citizenship status or alienage, sexual orientation, status as a victim of domestic violence, status as a victim of stalking, status as a victim of sex offenses, genetic information, political activities or recreational activities, arrest or conviction record, salary history, natural hairstyle or any other status protected by applicable law except as otherwise required or permitted by law or regulation applicable to the Company or its affiliates.