What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Site Reliability - Workflow Automation position at Dimensional Fund Advisors?
Job Description
About the Role:
We are looking for a Senior SRE to join our Platform Engineering team where you’ll own the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of our workflow orchestration platforms – primarily Apache Airflow and Broadcom Automic/UC4. This is a hybrid role: roughly half your time will be spent on steady state operations and incident response, and the other half on engineering projects that meaningfully improve the platforms you support.
This is a role for someone who is genuinely motivated by the pursuit of excellence – not just sustaining what works but relentlessly refining it. You care deeply about the craft of reliability and find satisfaction in the distance traveled between good and great, whether that means tightening observability, reducing toil, or building something that makes support activities easier to handle.
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 where you’ll own the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of our workflow orchestration platforms – primarily Apache Airflow and Broadcom Automic/UC4. This is a hybrid role: roughly half your time will be spent on steady state operations and incident response, and the other half on engineering projects that meaningfully improve the platforms you support.
This is a role for someone who is genuinely motivated by the pursuit of excellence – not just sustaining what works but relentlessly refining it. You care deeply about the craft of reliability and find satisfaction in the distance traveled between good and great, whether that means tightening observability, reducing toil, or building something that makes support activities easier to handle.
What You’ll Work On
Operations & Reliability (~ 50%)
- Serve as a primary escalation point for production support involving Airflow and UC4 – assisting end-user inquiries, incident root cause analysis, and implementing go-forward solutions
- Own and continuously improve SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for orchestration platforms
- Monitor platform health, capacity, and performance; proactively identify and remediate issues before they impact users
- Partner with data engineering and application teams to troubleshoot DAG failures, job dependencies, and scheduling issues
- Manage patching, upgrades, and configuration management for Airflow and UC4 environments
- 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 and automation to reduce toil and improve developer experience for teams that depend on Airflow and UC4 (among other platforms the team offers)
- Lead or contribute to platform modernization initiatives– e.g., migrating workloads, improving deployment pipelines, containerizing components, or adopting managed service offerings
- Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm, Ansible, etc.) for platform components
- Build observability solutions (e.g., dashboards, alerting, log aggregation) that give teams better visibility into their workflows
- Build and enforce standards around platform use that help engineering teams adopt 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 Apache Airflow – ideally including distributed executor configurations (Celery or Kubernetes), DAG authoring best practices, and multi-environment deployments
- Experience operating enterprise job scheduling platforms (e.g., Automic/UC4, Control-M, etc.)
- Strong Linux and Windows systems knowledge and comfort working in cloud environments (AWS preferred)
- Proficiency in Python for automation and tooling; familiarity with shell scripting
- Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) and CI/CD pipelines
- Solid understanding of observability principles – metrics, logging, tracing – and tools like ELK, Grafana, and Prometheus
- 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 Automic/UC4
- Experience with managed Airflow offerings (e.g., AWS MWAA, Cloud Composer, Astronomer)
- Familiarity with data platform ecosystems (e.g., dbt, Kafka, Snowflake)
- Experience migrating workloads from legacy schedulers to modern orchestration tools
- Prior experience defining and managing error budgets and SLO frameworks
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.