Senior Site Reliability Engineer — Observability

Contract: Approximately 3.5 months, through December 31, with strong potential to convert
Location: Remote within Europe
Working hours: Must consistently overlap with US Eastern Time mornings
Rate: Approximately $53 USD per hour, depending on experience
Start date: Mid-to-late September

About our Client

Our client is transforming the automotive care industry through an all-in-one shop management platform. Its software helps automotive businesses manage workflows, communicate with customers, process estimates and payments, and operate more efficiently across one or multiple locations.

We are looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer with deep observability expertise to strengthen the reliability and visibility of Shopmonkey’s production infrastructure.

The Role

This is a hands-on contract role for an experienced SRE who has built production-grade observability systems—not simply operated tools configured by others.

You will take ownership of OpenTelemetry-based telemetry pipelines within a Google Cloud and Kubernetes environment. You will help establish meaningful service-level objectives, improve alerting, and give engineering teams better visibility into the health and performance of production services.

The right person can work independently, make pragmatic infrastructure decisions, and collaborate effectively with application engineers during incidents and reliability improvements.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and improve OpenTelemetry pipelines for metrics, traces, and logs.

• Strengthen observability across services running on GCP and GKE.

• Integrate telemetry with tools such as Google Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace, Managed Service for Prometheus, and Grafana.

• Define and implement SLIs and SLOs based on customer and service reliability goals.

• Build actionable burn-rate alerts that identify reliability risks without generating unnecessary noise.

• Manage observability infrastructure through Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes.

• Improve dashboards, alerting, tracing, and service-level visibility.

• Participate in on-call and incident-response activities.

• Lead or contribute to root-cause analyses and follow incidents through to preventative improvements.

• Collaborate with software engineers and open pull requests against Go or Node.js services when instrumentation or application-level changes are needed.

• Document operational standards and help engineering teams adopt strong observability practices.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of professional experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, Production Engineering, or Observability.

• Proven, hands-on experience building an OpenTelemetry pipeline in a production GCP environment.

• Strong experience with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

• Experience with Google Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace, and Managed Service for Prometheus.

• Strong knowledge of Grafana, Prometheus, distributed tracing, metrics, logging, and telemetry architecture.

• Practical experience defining SLIs and SLOs and implementing multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerting.

• Strong hands-on experience managing infrastructure with Terraform and Helm.

• Production-level Kubernetes experience, including deploying and operating infrastructure components.

• Experience participating in on-call rotations, responding to incidents, and conducting thorough root-cause analyses.

• Ability to read, troubleshoot, and submit production code changes in Go or Node.js.

• Strong written and verbal English communication skills.

• Availability to work remotely from Europe with reliable overlap during US Eastern Time mornings.

This Role May Be a Great Fit If You

• Have personally designed observability infrastructure rather than only maintaining dashboards.

• Understand how telemetry moves from application instrumentation through collectors, processors, exporters, and storage or visualization systems.

• Can explain the tradeoffs behind sampling, cardinality, telemetry cost, alert thresholds, and signal quality.

• Build alerts around user impact and service reliability rather than individual infrastructure symptoms.

• Are comfortable moving between Kubernetes infrastructure, cloud services, observability tooling, and application code.

• Work effectively in an autonomous, fast-moving environment.

Interview Process

• Initial recorded screening focused on the core technical requirements.

• Technical interview with members of the engineering team.

• No take-home assessment.

• Fast-moving process for a single hire.

This engagement is expected to run through December 31 and offers strong potential for conversion based on performance and ongoing business needs.