Principal Site Reliability Engineer (Fastly, Cloudflare/Akamai)

Job description

About the role: The Gartner SRE team's mission is to deliver reliable, scalable, secure, and high-performing digital platforms that power Gartner's business and elevate customer experiences through a culture of reliability, innovation, and continuous improvement. We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to serve as senior technical leader responsible for advancing the reliability, resilience, performance, automation, and governance of Gartner's digital platforms. With a focus on global CDN and edge delivery capabilities, you will shape platform architecture, establish engineering standards, and drive cross-functional initiatives that improve operational maturity, accelerate delivery, and ensure exceptional customer experiences. What you will do: • Deliver world-class availability, stability, and performance for our digital products, ensuring a consistent and positive user experience for customers. • Establish multi-CDN architecture patterns, traffic-steering strategies, failover mechanisms, and operational standards to achieve five-nines (99.999%) availability targets. • Lead CDN incident response, disaster recovery exercises, capacity planning, and performance optimization initiatives to ensure uninterrupted customer experiences during internet-scale events. • Partner with Security, Infrastructure, and Application Development teams to implement and optimize edge security capabilities including DDoS protection, WAF policies, bot management, and edge compute services. • Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions to manage CDN configurations, governance policies, observability, WAF rules, and deployment processes. • Design, build, and maintain global traffic management policies, including DNS routing, certificate management, and load balancing, to meet disaster recovery (DR) and high-availability (HA) requirements. • Design and implement edge-computing solutions using Cloudflare Workers, Lambda@Edge, or equivalent technologies to address key application use cases. • Define and monitor CDN-specific SLOs, SLIs, and KPIs including cache hit ratio, origin offload, latency, availability, and traffic distribution across providers. • Identify opportunities to improve the performance, scalability, and stability of applications across the full technology stack. • Participate in operational support and on-call rotations to provide timely incident response for supported systems and applications. • Lead production incident resolution efforts, triage application and system issues, identify root causes, and implement remediation measures to restore services quickly. • Develop alerting strategies, dashboards, and reporting frameworks to communicate operational and business critical metrics. • Identify opportunities to automate manual operational work (i.e., “toil”) using pipelines, new software, or any other appropriate mechanisms. • Drive system design consulting, platform management, capacity planning, and launch reviews. • Partner with application teams to design and implement chaos engineering practices that improve resilience and fault tolerance. • Establish strong relationships with development teams, product owners, and other stakeholders to define and manage Service Level Objectives (SLOs). • Manage, collaborate and share lessons learned regarding CDN architecture and deployments with all stakeholders, including developers, other SREs, operations teams, and project management teams. • Improve customer experience and increase product value by enhancing the reliability, availability, and performance of client-facing applications and service • Internal relationships are critical to establish with application development teams and technology teams such as database, cloud/infrastructure, and enterprise architecture. What you will need: Must Have • Expert knowledge of one or two enterprise CDN platforms, including Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront, Akamai, or equivalent technologies, with hands-on experience designing, operating, and optimizing multi-CDN environments. • Experience implementing multi-CDN routing and failover solutions using DNS, GSLB, traffic management platforms, or real-user-performance (RUM) driven traffic steering. • Experience in managing large-scale CDN platforms using Terraform/OpenTofu, CI/CD pipelines, or provider specific automation frameworks such as Fastly VCL, Cloudflare APIs or equivalent. • Experience with CI/CD pipeline governance, code promotions, and Infrastructure-as-Code best practices to enable consistent, automated deployments across environments. • Expertise in CDN observability, performance analytics, log analysis, and troubleshooting user experience issues across global regions and internet service providers. • Strong understanding of edge security services including WAF, bot mitigation, DDoS protection, rate limiting, and zero-trust access controls. • Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, coupled with strong verbal and written communication capabilities. Good To have: • Demonstrated ability to adapt to changing priorities and technologies, with a strong commitment to continuous learning and professional development. • Experience in collaborating with Development, Cloud and Architecture teams or other relevant teams to conduct RCA, drive mission critical initiatives • Experience building Cloudflare Workers and snippets, AWS Lambda@Edge functions, Fastly VCL, and Fastly Compute solutions. • Experience with client-side technologies such as NodeJS, JavaScript, React JQuery and utilizing CDN features to improve UI performance • Hands-on experience creating ACM certificates in Fastly, Cloudflare, or AWS. • Exposure with monitoring tools like Splunk, Grafana and APM tools such as Dynatrace, or equivalent • Proficient in Operating Systems (UNIX/Linux) & networking concepts. • Exposure to Performance & chaos Engineering concepts Who you are : • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or related