Site Reliability Engineer

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Canonical, your responsibilities include architecting and managing cloud infrastructure, primarily utilizing OpenStack and Kubernetes. You'll be involved in implementing devsecops practices across the infrastructure and applications, ensuring high availability and reliability for mission-critical services. Additionally, you'll work on automating processes to elevate operational efficiency, using your Python expertise to drive improvements in our infrastructure.

To be a successful Site Reliability Engineer at Canonical, you should have a degree in Software Engineering or Computer Science, along with solid experience in Python development. Familiarity with Linux, networking, and storage is essential. Ideal candidates will also have operational experience and a proactive mindset, coupled with excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, and flexibility. Experience in OpenStack or Kubernetes is considered a plus.

Canonical offers a generous learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year for Site Reliability Engineers, promoting continued education and skill enhancement. We also conduct annual compensation reviews to ensure your salary reflects your performance, alongside opportunities for recognition and rewards for outstanding contributions to the team.

The work environment for a Site Reliability Engineer at Canonical is fully remote and highly collaborative, with colleagues from diverse backgrounds working together globally. We meet in-person twice a year in exciting locations for team sprints, allowing for connection and alignment on strategic initiatives. Canonical promotes a culture of inclusivity and encourages open communication, making it a dynamic place to grow your career.

Yes, as a Site Reliability Engineer at Canonical, you will be required to travel internationally twice a year for company events lasting up to two weeks. This is a great opportunity to build relationships with your colleagues while experiencing different cultures and locations.

When answering this question, provide specific examples of projects where you used Python to solve operational challenges or automate processes. Highlight how you leveraged libraries or frameworks that are relevant to site reliability engineering and discuss any metrics you achieved or improvements you drove using your Python skills.

Explain your systematic approach to troubleshooting, focusing on how you gather information, analyze logs, and use metrics to isolate issues. Discuss tools you might use, such as monitoring solutions or logging frameworks, and provide an example of a challenging issue you resolved effectively.

Discuss your hands-on experience with deploying and managing clusters in both Kubernetes and OpenStack. Highlight specific projects where you designed infrastructure or encountered challenges, and share how you addressed those challenges to improve performance or reliability.

Share your strategies for ensuring high availability, such as load balancing, redundancy setups, or automated failover processes. Cite real-world examples where you applied these strategies to maintain uptime for critical services.

Your answer should reflect your ability to balance multiple priorities effectively. Discuss techniques like the Eisenhower Box or Agile methodologies that help you prioritize urgent and important tasks, ensuring you meet deadlines and service level agreements.

Talk about your experience integrating security into the development and operations processes. Provide examples of specific methodologies or tools you've utilized to enhance the security posture of applications and infrastructure.

Discuss key performance indicators (KPIs) you track, such as uptime, response time, and incident rates. Explain how you monitor these metrics using tools like Grafana or Prometheus, and how they influence your operational decisions.

Emphasize your commitment to continuous learning through reading blogs, participating in webinars, or contributing to open source projects. Mention specific resources or communities that keep you informed about the latest trends and technologies in cloud infrastructure.

Provide a specific example of a high-pressure situation—like an outage, performance degradation, or security incident—and describe how you managed it. Detail your thought process, the actions you took, and the outcomes resulting from your response.

Share your insights on the evolving role of Site Reliability Engineers, touching upon automation, AI integration, and the increasing importance of collaboration between development and operations teams. Discuss how you see these trends shaping the profession in the coming years.