Senior Operations Engineer - Production Reliability and Automation Job Description

The Senior Operations Engineer role is suited to experienced operations professionals who focus on reliability, automation and operational excellence. Candidates should have a track record of managing production systems, leading incident response and driving improvements to availability and performance.

Senior Operations Engineer Job Profile

The Senior Operations Engineer is responsible for ensuring the stability, performance and scalability of critical production services. This role combines hands on technical work with operational leadership to reduce risk, streamline operational processes and support continuous delivery of software and infrastructure changes.

The purpose of the position is to provide technical ownership for operational capabilities, to mentor less experienced engineers, and to work across engineering and product teams to embed reliable operation practices into the development lifecycle.

Senior Operations Engineer Job Description

The Senior Operations Engineer will define and implement operational standards, manage incidents and problem resolution, and lead post-incident reviews to identify and implement corrective actions. The role requires proactive monitoring of system health, capacity planning and performance tuning to meet service level objectives. The engineer will also contribute to change control processes and ensure that releases to production are managed with appropriate risk mitigation and rollback plans.

In day to day work the role involves creating and improving runbooks, automating routine tasks, and developing instrumentation to measure reliability and availability. The Senior Operations Engineer will collaborate with development teams to improve system observability and to design for resilience, while representing operational concerns in planning and delivery forums. Clear documentation and knowledge transfer are expected components of the role.

Senior Operations Engineer: Duties and Responsibilities

• Take ownership of production system reliability and availability, tracking key operational metrics and targets.
• Lead and coordinate incident response activities, including detection, mitigation and communication with stakeholders.
• Conduct post-incident reviews and drive remediation actions to prevent recurrence of issues.
• Design, implement and maintain automation to reduce manual operational work and improve deployment consistency.
• Develop and maintain runbooks, operational playbooks and run time documentation for production services.
• Perform capacity planning and performance analysis to inform scaling and provisioning decisions.
• Manage change control and release coordination to ensure safe deployment of software and infrastructure changes.
• Improve monitoring, alerting and logging to provide timely and actionable observability of systems.
• Implement backup, recovery and business continuity practices and validate recovery procedures.
• Apply configuration management principles to maintain consistent and auditable system states.
• Drive security hardening and compliance activities in collaboration with security and risk teams.
• Mentor and coach junior operations staff, providing technical guidance and career support.
• Collaborate with development teams to design for operability and incorporate reliability requirements into designs.
• Contribute to operational roadmaps and continuous improvement initiatives to reduce toil and increase resilience.

Senior Operations Engineer: Requirements and Qualifications

• Bachelor degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least five years of experience in systems operations, site reliability, or production engineering roles.
• Proven experience in incident management and root cause analysis with a focus on driving remediations.
• Strong understanding of operating systems, networking concepts and system architecture.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language for automation and tooling.
• Experience designing and implementing automation to reduce manual tasks and improve consistency.
• Familiarity with monitoring, logging and observability practices to measure service health.
• Knowledge of capacity planning, performance tuning and scalability strategies.
• Experience with change control, release management and production deployment practices.
• Excellent analytical and problem solving skills, with a methodical approach to troubleshooting.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, able to create clear documentation and engage stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor colleagues and contribute to a collaborative team culture.