Title: Site Reliability Engineer II
Newport News, Virginia, US, 23606
At Jefferson Lab, you’ll champion cutting-edge science and operational excellence while shaping the future of discovery. Join us and make your mark – where excellence meets purpose, and great minds truly matter.
The good-faith pay range for this role is $91,800 - $145,050 per year. Actual compensation may vary and may be above the posted range based on factors such as a candidate's skills, experience, education, certifications, and work location.
What your job will be like:
In this job you will:
- Build and operate monitoring, logging, and alerting for HPDF systems using modern observability tooling (for example Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK), within guidelines set with the lead site reliability engineer and senior staff.
- Develop automation and tooling in Python, Go, or shell that eliminates manual operations and reduces operational risk, following standard software development practices including version control, code review, and testing.
- Respond to incidents and author the runbooks, postmortems, and operational documentation that convert each incident into a lasting improvement to facility reliability.
- Implement and report on Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) defined with the architecture team and scientific stakeholders.
- Support expert scientific users by helping research physicists and computational scientists understand system behavior and by translating their needs into reliability requirements.
- Collaborate with colleagues at both Jefferson Lab and Berkeley Lab, sharing tooling, reviews, and operational practice across the HPDF partnership.
- Conduct testing and performance analysis to validate reliability and resilience decisions and to identify bottlenecks.
Additional Responsibilities
- Contribute to evaluations of vendor and open source technologies against reliability, performance, and security requirements.
- Participate in an on-call rotation as the facility moves toward operations.
Experience
- Required: 3 or more years related experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, systems engineering, or software engineering with operational responsibility.
- Preferred: 3 or more years experience supporting scientific computing, HPC, or research environments; experience operating systems in support of users outside the engineer's own team
- Preferred: Experience with containers and Kubernetes
- Preferred: Practical experience applying AI assisted or autonomous automation to operational tasks, and routine use of AI tools in day to day engineering work.
- Preferred: Experience with configuration management and infrastructure as code tools (for example Ansible, Terraform, Puppet).
Education
- Required: Bachelor's Degree Computer Science or Related Field
- Preferred: Master's Degree Computer Science or Related Field
Experience and Education Exchange
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
- Solid Linux systems skills and command line fluency, with the ability to troubleshoot across the application, operating system, and network layers.
- Scripting and automation ability in Python, Go, or shell, including familiarity with standard software development practices.
- Working knowledge of monitoring and observability tools (for example Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry) and strong motivation to deepen that expertise in a new facility environment.
- Clear written and verbal communication, and the ability to work productively with a community of scientific users and with colleagues across both laboratories.
- A self starter's approach to learning new technologies and to identifying and solving problems within an assigned scope.
- Familiarity with public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Networking fundamentals (IPv4/IPv6, DNS, firewalls, access control lists) and security conscious operational habits.
- Exposure to HPC or scientific computing environments.
About Jefferson Lab
Join a community with a common purpose of solving the most challenging scientific and engineering problems of our time. The Jefferson Lab campus is located in southeastern Virginia amidst a vibrant and growing technology community.
A career at Jefferson Lab is more than a job. You will be part of “big science” and work alongside top scientists and engineers from around the world unlocking the secrets of our visible universe. Managed by SURATech, LLC, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is entering an exciting period of mission growth and is seeking new team members ready to apply their skills and passion to have an impact. You could call it work, or you could call it a mission. We call it a challenge. We do things that will change the world.
Total Rewards at Jefferson Lab
At Jefferson Lab, we believe that a comprehensive employee benefits program is an important and meaningful part of the compensation employees receive. Our benefits program includes, but is not limited to:
• Medical, Dental, and Vision Care Plans • Flexible Spending Accounts
• Paid Time-off and Leave Programs (Paid Parental, vacation, holidays, and sick leave)
• 401(k) Plan – 9% Lab Contribution; 100% vested • Flexible Work Arrangements
(Remote & Alternate Work Schedules available)
• Tuition Assistance, Training and Professional Development Programs
• Live near the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay region with access to nearby beaches,
mountains, and all major metropolitan centers on the East Coast
SURATech, LLC manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab). SURATech is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
SURATech is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities (unless doing so will result in an undue hardship). If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please send an e-mail to recruiting@jlab.org or contact Human Resources by calling (757) 269-7100 and selecting option 1 between 8 am – 5 pm EST to provide the nature of your request.
Employment with SURATech is conditional upon DOE approval if at any time during your employment you are participating in a Foreign Government Talent Recruitment Program or Affiliated activity. Generally, such programs/activities include any foreign-state-sponsored attempt to acquire U.S.-funded scientific research through programs run or funded by the government that target scientists, engineers, students, academics, researchers, and entrepreneurs of all nationalities working or educated in the United States. This includes positions or appointments, both domestic and foreign, titled academic, professional, or institutional appointments whether or not remuneration is received and whether full-time, part-time or voluntary.
Nearest Major Market: Hampton Roads