Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Merck Merck · Pharma · Central Bohemian, Czech Republic

Senior Site Reliability Engineer responsible for the reliability, scalability, and security of critical platforms and applications in a global healthcare biopharma technology team. The role involves hands-on engineering, driving modernization, shaping operational best practices, mentoring engineers, and collaborating across products and regions to deliver resilient, high-performing systems.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead reliability efforts: define and own SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, availability goals, and improvement plans for services under your scope.
  2. Design and implement robust, scalable architectures and automation that minimize operational toil and support rapid delivery.
  3. Build and maintain IaC, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing to ensure consistent, auditable deployments.
  4. Drive observability and proactive monitoring: implement metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting that enable data-driven reliability improvements.
  5. Lead incident response for complex issues, coordinate cross-team resolution, conduct blameless postmortems, and drive preventative actions.

Skills

Required

  • BSc in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or equivalent experience
  • 5+ years of hands-on experience in SRE, Platform, or DevOps engineering
  • Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP experience valuable) and cloud-native services.
  • Strong skills with IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar), Git-based workflows, and mature CI/CD pipelines.
  • Demonstrated experience defining and operating SLOs, SLIs, SLAs, and error budget processes.
  • Proficiency with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing).
  • Solid programming/scripting skills (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, or similar) and experience building automation and tooling.
  • Strong knowledge of networking (VPCs, VPNs, load balancing, firewalls) and cloud security best practices and compliance frameworks.
  • Animal Vaccination
  • Compliance Frameworks
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration
  • Data Engineering
  • Data Visualization
  • Design Applications
  • DevOps Engineering
  • Distributed Systems
  • Knowledge Sharing
  • Performance Analysis
  • Platform Engineering
  • Preventive Action
  • Software Configurations
  • Software Development
  • Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
  • Solution Architecture
  • Stakeholder Management
  • System Designs
  • System Integration
  • Technology Roadmap
  • Testing

Nice to have

  • Experience with platform engineering patterns, multi-tenant platforms, and managing analytics or data platforms is a plus.
  • Familiarity with Conversational BI tools, Power Platform, and emerging LLM/Copilot concepts.
  • Excellent problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder-management skills; experience working with global, cross-functional teams.
  • Relevant certifications (AWS Professional, Kubernetes, etc.) are a plus.
  • Prior experience in regulated industries (pharma/healthcare) with understanding of validation and compliance requirements.
  • Experience designing or operating cloud-native analytics platforms and multi-tenant services.
  • Leadership experience in building and scaling engineering teams or center-of-excellence functions.

What the JD emphasized

  • proven ownership of reliability for production systems
  • Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP experience valuable)
  • Strong skills with IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar), Git-based workflows, and mature CI/CD pipelines.
  • Demonstrated experience defining and operating SLOs, SLIs, SLAs, and error budget processes.
  • Proficiency with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing).
  • Solid programming/scripting skills (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, or similar) and experience building automation and tooling.
  • Strong knowledge of networking (VPCs, VPNs, load balancing, firewalls) and cloud security best practices and compliance frameworks.