Senior SRE Engineer

The Role

This is a 6-month contract role, with a potential to convert to full-time on the Platform Engineering team, working closely with global development, operations, and delivery teams. Platform Engineering owns the reliability, availability, and performance of our infrastructure and services across a multi-account, multi-tenant AWS environment spanning multiple regions. The role balances hands-on technical work with team leadership: driving initiatives, mentoring engineers, owning SLA/SLO adherence, leading incident management, and automating toil out of day-to-day operations.

Ready to lead reliability at scale? If you thrive in fast-paced environments and are passionate about system reliability, security, and operational excellence, we invite you to join our Platform Engineering team.

As a Senior SRE Engineer, you will:

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable systems for uptime, resilience, and performance, while defining and enforcing SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs with product teams.
• Own incident detection, escalation, and resolution, developing playbooks for failure scenarios and leading post-mortem analyses with corrective actions.
• Build monitoring, logging, and alerting systems, and develop automation for deployments, maintenance, and toil reduction.
• Drive CI/CD improvements and maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and best practices.
• Partner with developers on reliability by design, fostering shared responsibility for observability and fault tolerance.
• Enforce security policies and standards, collaborating on vulnerability identification and mitigation strategies.

Required Experience & Skills

• AWS Cloud Services: Deep working knowledge across compute, networking, security, storage, and data services in multi-account, multi-region environments.
• Kubernetes/EKS: Experience deploying and maintaining Kubernetes with multi-AZ, multi-region, and multi-tenant topologies.
• Hybrid Networking: Expertise in VPC design, VPN connectivity, on-prem/hybrid topology, and edge solutions.
• CI/CD Pipelines: Experience building and maintaining pipelines using CodePipeline, CodeBuild, ECR, and ArgoCD.
• Infrastructure Design: Ability to design scalable, resilient infrastructure with security, observability, and automation built in.
• Cert/PKI Management: Knowledge of certificate and PKI lifecycle management, including HSM-backed key protection and mTLS.
• Security & Cryptography: Strong understanding of encryption, cryptographic protocols, and HSM integration.
• Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in Python, Go, and Bash for automation and infrastructure-as-code.
• Compliance as Code: Experience using AWS Config to translate policy requirements into automated compliance checks.
• Observability Platforms: Hands-on experience with Datadog for metrics, distributed tracing, log management, and APM.
• Chaos Engineering: Experience applying chaos engineering practices to proactively validate system resilience.

Preferred Skills & Attributes

• Tactical & Operational: Ability to drive team initiatives, own delivery outcomes, and act as a reliability champion.
• System Reliability Advocacy: Champion robust system design and operational excellence across engineering and product teams.
• Analytical Problem-Solving: Skilled at diagnosing and resolving complex, multi-layer issues in distributed, cloud-native environments.
• Cross-Functional Communication: Effective collaborator across development, security, and operations teams in a global organization.
• Incident Response Leadership: Experience leading swift resolution of high-severity incidents to minimize downtime.
• Culture of Ownership: Fosters accountability and a blameless culture focused on reliability and continuous improvement.
• Adaptability: Comfortable problem-solving creatively in fast-moving environments with shifting priorities.

The Environment You’ll Work In

The Platform Environment

• Multi-account AWS architecture: Per-client account isolation for highest-tier tenants; shared-account segregation for standard tenants.
• Multi-region deployment: Active-active or active-passive topology for disaster recovery and geographic resilience.
• Hybrid connectivity: Client API integration via VPN to on-premises or cloud environments with HSM-backed mTLS.
• Service mesh: Istio on EKS for traffic management, mutual TLS, observability, and policy enforcement.
• GitOps delivery: ArgoCD for declarative, version-controlled application deployment to Kubernetes.
• End-to-end observability: Datadog across all tiers for real-time visibility, alerting, and capacity planning.

The Technology Stack

• Cloud & Networking: Route53, ELB (NLB/ALB), WAF, VPC, NAT, IGW, VGW, VPN, Lambda
• Compute & Orchestration: EKS (Kubernetes), Istio Service Mesh, NGINX, ArgoCD
• Data & Messaging: RDS, DynamoDB, S3, ActiveMQ, Redis
• Security & Compliance: AWS HSM, KMS, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store, AWS Config, mTLS/PKI
• CI/CD & Registry: CodePipeline, CodeBuild, ECR
• Observability: Datadog (metrics, logs, traces, APM)
• Scripting & IaC: GoLang, Python, Terraform

Our Commitment

Akoya is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status. We’re committed to building an inclusive, welcoming workplace where people feel supported, respected, and empowered to do their best work.

We know that experience can come from many different paths. We value diverse perspectives and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if they don’t meet all listed qualifications. If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. You may be the right candidate for this role or another opportunity at Akoya.

Where We Work

Akoya is remote-first, with this role open to candidates currently located within commuting distance of Boston, MA, New York, NY, and Raleigh, NC. While our teams work primarily remote, we are building talent hubs in these locations to create opportunities for in-person collaboration, team connection, and professional development.

Compensation & Benefits

This role is a 6-month contract role, with a potential to convert to full-time, with an expected hourly rate of $55 - $75.   

The actual hourly rate offered considers the candidate's work location, relevant education, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience, among other factors.  

Candidates who receive offers must complete successful criminal background, drug, and credit screenings.