Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) m/f/x

Makersite GmbH is currently expanding its technical team and is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help drive their mission in sustainable product development. As the company continues to pioneer digital solutions for product lifecycle management, they require an experienced professional who can ensure their infrastructure remains robust, scalable, and compliant with international standards. This remote-first role offers the chance to influence the technological backbone of a company focused on responsible manufacturing and supply chain transparency.

About the role

This position is designed for an experienced engineer who enjoys the duality of proactive infrastructure design and reactive incident response. You will be responsible for the health of a complex production environment, ensuring that the tools Makersite provides to its global clients are available and performant. Because the company operates at the intersection of technology and sustainability, you will not just be managing servers; you will be facilitating the digital transformation of industries that are actively working to reduce their environmental impact.

The role involves a high level of cross-functional collaboration. You will work closely with software developers to streamline release cycles and maintain uptime, while also taking on the responsibility of managing system compliance. As a senior member of the team, you will be expected to mentor others, helping to upskill junior staff and promoting a culture of technical excellence and psychological safety during incident resolution.

The core of this role involves balancing daily operational maintenance with long-term capacity planning. You will be expected to:

• **Infrastructure Oversight:** Manage and maintain existing infrastructure while identifying technical bottlenecks that hinder performance.
• **System Reliability:** Design and implement robust monitoring, alerting, and observability frameworks (using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or CloudWatch) to track system health.
• **Release and Backup Management:** Oversee software releases to ensure seamless deployments and manage backups to ensure strict adherence to Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
• **Incident Response:** Lead post-mortem analyses following system disruptions to ensure lessons are learned and repeat incidents are prevented. This will include participating in a rotation for off-duty or pager support.
• **Compliance:** Ensure that all infrastructure and internal processes meet the rigorous demands of ISO certifications.

What they're looking for

Makersite is looking for a seasoned professional with a deep background in DevOps and SRE principles. Candidates should possess the following qualifications:

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• At least 7 years of relevant experience, with a minimum of 3 years specifically focused on SRE or DevOps-related infrastructure.
• Strong technical proficiency in cloud platforms, specifically AWS or Azure.
• Proven expertise in Infrastructure-as-Code tools, particularly Terraform and Ansible.
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills, with a track record of handling high-pressure incident management.
• Experience in coaching or mentoring team members, demonstrating strong leadership and communication skills.

For South African developers, a role of this nature at a global firm like Makersite typically offers a competitive international salary, often paid in foreign currency or pegged to the USD or EUR, which is highly advantageous in the local economy. Senior SRE positions in the local market are increasingly moving toward fully remote, global contracts. This path offers significant career growth, as professionals often move from Senior SRE into roles such as Staff Engineer, Lead Architect, or Head of Platform Engineering, especially as local organisations continue to adopt complex cloud-native architectures.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, IT, or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in site reliability engineering or a similar role.
• 3+ years in SRE, DevOps, or related infrastructure roles.
• Experience supporting/coaching less experienced team members.
• Ability in building alerting and observability into all production systems (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch etc.).
• Proven experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS or Azure.
• Extensive experience using Terraform and Ansible.
• Incident management, postmortems, and on-call quality of life experience.
• Strong knowledge of system monitoring tools.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to troubleshoot complex issues.