Principal Site Reliability Engineer

 Leidos has an opportunity within the newly created Digital Modernization Practice Area, leading Site Reliability Engineering for the Repeatable Offerings (RO) organization. The RO organization is the delivery arm of the Digital Modernization sector’s Repeatable Offerings, delivering differentiated capabilities and managed services across the sector and the larger Leidos corporation. We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to lead the design, implementation, and operation of scalable, highly available systems. As a subject matter expert, you will establish best practices for reliability, security, and efficiency while driving innovation in our deployment and operations strategies. You will collaborate with development teams to improve system performance, automate processes, and ensure smooth recovery in high-pressure situations.

The team is primarily located in Blacksburg, VA, and the selected candidate will be required to either be on-site in Blacksburg or will travel frequently to that location, as well as other locations are required.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Lead the development and execution of SRE strategies to enhance system reliability, scalability, and efficiency.
• Manage production systems and operations, ensuring robust development and implementation processes.
• Oversee recovery efforts for unstable or at-risk projects, applying expertise in remediation strategies.
• Design and implement microservice architectures, including orchestrators, for high-performance distributed systems.
• Develop, maintain, and optimize CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), and automation frameworks.
• Drive adoption of best practices for horizontal and vertical scaling of microservices.
• Define and implement packaging and deployment strategies to support rapid and reliable software delivery.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve observability, monitoring, and operational excellence.
• Provide technical leadership in managing containerized applications and orchestration platforms.
• Mentor and guide teams on modern reliability engineering methodologies and best practices.

Basic Qualifications:

• Requires BS degree and 12 – 15 years of prior relevant experience or Masters with 10 – 13 years of prior relevant experience.
• Proven experience as a Principal SRE or equivalent role in establishing robust and reliable systems.
• Expertise in managing production systems and operations, including monitoring, incident response, and performance optimization.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration.
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), Helm Charts, and Operators.
• Hands-on experience in designing and implementing microservice architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience leading development teams in packaging and deployment strategies.
• Strong knowledge of management strategies and techniques to support SRE principles.
• Must have U.S. Citizenship.
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance specific to the customer.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong experience with OpenShift in enterprise environments.
• Experience with auto-scaling, self-healing architectures, and advanced resiliency strategies.
• Demonstrated success in improving and recovering red/unhealthy projects.
• Familiarity with service mesh technologies and distributed tracing for monitoring and observability.
• Expertise in designing and implementing highly available, fault-tolerant systems at scale.
• Experience working on Federal Government contracts.

Original Posting:

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.