Principal SRE

Principle SRE
Merge medical imaging solutions, offered by Merative, combine intelligent, scalable imaging workflow tools with deep and broad expertise to help healthcare organizations improve their confidence in patient outcomes and optimize care delivery.
With minimal supervision, leverages deep technical expertise to set the reliability, observability, and operational automation direction for business-critical, PHI-bearing cloud platforms.
Establishes reliability standards, service level objectives, and automation practices across multiple teams, and leads their implementation through technical influence rather than direct reporting authority.
Responsibilities:
People
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Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and leadership to engineers across development, QA, and operations teams.
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Interact regularly with lower and/or senior management on matters concerning multiple functional areas, departments, and/or customers.
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Act as a senior point of escalation for complex or high-severity production issues.
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Build reliability capability in others through design reviews, pairing, and blameless post-incident learning.
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Foster a culture and develop approaches that generate innovative ideas, products, and services.
Reliability Engineering
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Define, publish, and govern service level objectives (SLOs) management framework, help to define service level indicators, and error budgets for the platform and its shared services.
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Set observability standards for metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting, and drive consistent adoption across teams.
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Own the technical side of the incident lifecycle: detection, response, escalation, and post-incident review; drive corrective actions to closure.
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Lead capacity planning, performance engineering, failure-domain isolation, and disaster recovery design.
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Drive resilience patterns into product architecture in partnership with development teams.
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Monitor and act on incoming issues from support, customers, or other stakeholders.
Operational Automation Design and Implementation
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Design the automation strategy for platform operations and set the standards, patterns, and tooling other engineers build against.
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Design and implement automated remediation for recurring failure modes so routine faults are resolved without human intervention.
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Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code, environment provisioning, and deployment automation.
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Automate recurring operational work including patching, scaling, certificate rotation, backup and restore validation, and disaster recovery exercises.
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Build self-service tooling that lets development and support teams perform routine operational tasks safely and without escalation.
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Automate the collection of evidence and the verification of security and compliance controls that apply to PHI-bearing workloads.
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Identify, measure, and reduce operational toil; set and report against measurable toil-reduction targets.
Process
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Provide guidance on company processes.
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Liaise with cross functional teams (development, product, program management, support, implementation, security, etc.) in delivering and supporting their projects.
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Support cross functional teams in resolving customer concerns.
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Participate in the creation and/or review and/or approval of architecture, design, and project documents.
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Plan, track, and deliver assigned reliability and automation initiatives, on-time and on-budget.
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Report initiative status and immediately escalate when work is varying from commitments.
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Effectively represent the platform’s reliability posture to the customer and to auditors if/as needed.
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Adhere to Merge methodology, quality system requirements, and good engineering practices.
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Provide input into applicable budgets, including cloud consumption and tooling spend.
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Pursue self-development as an employee to be better at their current role as well as to grow into their next role if/as appropriate.
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Adhere to all applicable legal requirements.
Core Competencies
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Organized: Demonstrates strong planning, coordination, and attention to detail while managing multiple priorities.
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Analytical: Uses data-driven thinking and sound judgment to solve complex problems and make informed decisions.
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Growth Mindset: Embraces feedback, continuous learning, and opportunities for personal and professional development.
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Quick Learner: Rapidly acquires new technical knowledge, processes, and business context.
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Systems Thinking: Understands and evaluates failures and performance across an entire distributed platform rather than focusing on isolated components.
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Technical Acumen: Possesses deep expertise in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, with the credibility to influence technical strategy across teams.
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Automation-First Mindset: Continuously seeks opportunities to eliminate manual effort through scalable automation and process improvement.
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Communication Skills: Effectively communicates complex ideas through clear, concise verbal and written communication.
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Leadership & Influence: Builds alignment, drives outcomes, and influences stakeholders without relying on direct authority.
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Priority Management: Effectively balances competing demands and focuses efforts on the highest-impact work.
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Composure Under Pressure: Maintains sound judgment, clear decision-making, and calm leadership during production incidents and high-pressure situations.
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Collaboration: Builds strong relationships and works effectively with diverse stakeholders across teams, functions, and external partners.
Technical Skills, (if applicable):
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Cloud infrastructure and architecture, with depth in Microsoft Azure
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Infrastructure as code and configuration management (e.g., Terraform, Bicep/ARM, Ansible)
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CI/CD pipeline design and release automation
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Containers and orchestration (Kubernetes/AKS); service mesh concepts
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Observability and telemetry tooling (e.g., Azure Monitor/KQL, Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing)
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Proficiency in at least one automation or systems language (e.g., Python, Go, Bash, Java)
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Linux administration, networking, and identity/authorization fundamentals
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Incident management and post-incident analysis practice
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Ability to understand software architecture and design patterns
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Technical Project Management
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Experience in an Agile Environment
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Microsoft Office
Preferred Skills
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Service mesh implementation (Istio)
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Event streaming and messaging platforms (Kafka)
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Relational and NoSQL data platform operations at scale
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Cybersecurity and security engineering
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Chaos engineering and resilience testing
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Data Engineering
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Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence applied to operations
Supervisory Skills, (if applicable):
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Individual contributor role; no direct reports.
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Possess some fundamental leadership skills including strategic thinking, team building, adaptability and conflict resolution.
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Ability to technically lead and influence experienced level professionals.
Qualifications Required:
a) Education Requirements:
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Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field; or equivalent level of industry related experience.
Preferred
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Azure certification (e.g., Azure Solutions Architect Expert or DevOps Engineer Expert).
Experience Required
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10+ years’ experience in software engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure operations with demonstrated progression into a principal or staff level technical role.
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Demonstrated experience informally leading teams, projects or people to successful outcomes.
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Demonstrated experience operating production SaaS at scale against formal availability commitments.
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Demonstrated ex