Site Reliability Engineer

"We are searching for an exceptional Site Reliability Engineer to join our growing engineering team! This role is perfect for someone passionate about architecting scalable cloud infrastructure, maintaining Kubernetes clusters, building robust CI/CD pipelines, and establishing comprehensive observability to ensure our platforms and internal services remain reliable, performant, and resilient. Looking forward to seeing how you'll help drive our engineering operational excellence forward!"

- Greg Burlet, Director of Engineering

Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) is one of Canada's three main institutes for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, our world-renowned researchers drive fundamental and applied research at the University of Alberta (and other academic institutions), training some of the world's top scientific talent. Our cross-functional teams work collaboratively with Alberta-based businesses and organizations to build AI capacity and translate scientific advancement into industry adoption and economic impact.

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) plays a key role in ensuring that production applications, infrastructure, and internal services remain reliable, performant, and scalable. As a core technical team member, the SRE collaborates with both the Engineering and IT teams to manage cloud infrastructure, build robust CI/CD and deployment automation, maintain Kubernetes clusters, and establish comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and incident management workflows. Crucially, this role is responsible for ensuring that internal services created by the Engineering team for both intracompany and external use operate reliably and scale seamlessly according to demand.

The Site Reliability Engineer will focus on improving system availability, resilience, performance, and operational efficiency across all hosted services and infrastructure. This role spans production operations, infrastructure-as-code, deployment automation, capacity planning, budget management, and observational tooling. A central purpose of the role is to guarantee that internal platforms and services developed by the Engineering team, whether serving internal Amii staff or external customers, run with high availability, meet defined SLAs/SLOs, and automatically or efficiently scale to meet fluctuating user demand.

In addition to day-to-day operations and incident response, the Site Reliability Engineer will partner with the Director, Engineering to establish reliability best practices, budgets, disaster recovery playbooks, infrastructure automation standards, and scalable cloud architectures across the organization.

The position focuses on achieving excellence in three main accountabilities:

• Infrastructure Reliability & Internal Service Scaling
• Observability, Automation & Incident Management
• Reliability Coaching & Operational Excellence

• Ensures all internal and external services created by the Engineering team run with high availability, resilience, and automatically/dynamically scale based on traffic and demand.
• Architects and manages containerized workloads on Kubernetes clusters (EKS/GKE) and cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform).
• Designs, implements, and maintains robust CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous, automated, and zero-downtime deployment of microservices and internal tools.
• Contributes to development of CI/CD pipelines and ansibles for bare-metal deployments.
• Conducts capacity planning, load testing, auto-scaling configurations, and performance tuning across cloud networks, databases, and API gateways.
• Implements automated disaster recovery, backup, and failover mechanisms across critical production and non-production systems.
• Participates in sprint planning and other agile methodology ceremonies.
• Establishes comprehensive observability frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.) for real-time monitoring, metrics, log aggregation, and tracing.
• Defines, tracks, and enforces Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budgets for internal and external platform services.
• Leads on-call rotations, incident response, root cause analysis (RCA), and blameless post-mortems to continuously improve system resilience.
• Automates operational toil, security patching, certificate management, and system maintenance using scripts and infrastructure tools.
• Monitors and optimizes AI workload infrastructure (e.g., vector database hosting, model inference serving, compute GPU/CPU utilization) for stability and cost efficiency.
• Collaborates with product management and AI researchers to translate complex AI models into scalable software products.
• Ensures data privacy, access control, and regulatory compliance across databases and AI vector stores.
• Collaborates with software engineers during architecture reviews to embed reliability, security, auto-scaling, and maintainability early in product design.
• Mentors team members on cloud-native practices, DevOps/SRE tooling, observability standards, and efficient incident management.
• Partners with the Director, Engineering to manage cloud spending, monitor FinOps metrics, and establish long-term infrastructure roadmaps.
• Partners with the Director, Engineering to establish long-term technological roadmap and software development strategies.

• Post-Secondary Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field
• 2+ years of professional experience in site reliability engineering, DevOps, or system architecture in cloud environments
• Hands-on experience managing Kubernetes container orchestration, Docker, Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), and cloud providers (predominantly GCP)
• Proven track record of managing internal and external software services, ensuring high reliability, uptime, and automated scaling according to demand
• Strong proficiency in observability and monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Loki, etc.) and configuring SLIs/SLOs/Error Budgets
• Experience building and maintaining automated CI/CD deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD)
• Solid understanding of networking protocols, load balancing, API gateways, security best practices, and database management
• Experience operating in Agile environments and delivering production software in cloud infrastructure (predominantly GCP)

• Advanced critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Strong interpersonal communication skills for effective collaboration with internal teams and external stakeholders. Operates with integrity and trust
• Passion for designing effective learning exercises, technical concept illustrations, training, and evaluation tools
• Ability to manage multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment
• Demonstrates professional maturity, resourcefulness, and self-discipline in pursuing organizational goals
• A curious mindset with a keen interest in testing new educational tools and technologies
• Shows presence, self-confidence, sound judgment, and superior problem-solving abilities
• Fosters high-level cross-functional collaboration and establishes credibility while influencing peers to achieve common goals

• A professional yet casual work environment that encourages the growth and development of your skills.
• Participate in professional development activities
• Gain access to the Amii community and events
• A chance to learn from amazing teammates who support one another to succeed.
• Competitive compensation, including paid time off and flexible health benefits.
• A modern office located in downtown Edmonton, Alberta.

We're excited to add a new member to the Amii team for this role! We are keeping the door open to new applicants until we find the right fit. When sending your application, please send your resume and cover letter indicating why you think you'd be a fit for Amii. In your cover letter, please include one professional accomplishment you are most proud of and why.

Applicants must be legally eligible to work in Canada at the time of application.

Amii is an equal opportunity employer and values a diverse workforce. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals without regard to ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age or disability. Accommodations for disability-related needs throughout the recruitment and selection process are available upon request. Any information provided by you for accommodations will be kept confidential and won't be used in the selection process.