Sr lead site reliability engineer

Lumen is the trusted network for the AI‑powered world, connecting people, data, and applications through our expansive fiber network and connected ecosystem. We enable secure, high‑performance connectivity across cloud, edge, and AI workloads for enterprises, governments, and communities.

At Lumen, you’ll work on infrastructure customers rely on today and build for what’s next, where performance, security, and resilience matter. This is a high accountability environment where bold ideas drive real innovation for our customers, partners, and industry. The work is challenging, expectations are clear, and trust is built into how we operate. If you’re ready to take ownership, deliver meaningful impact, and help shape the future of AI‑ready connectivity, join us today.

The Role

We are seeking a highly skilled and proactive Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our team, focusing on production support and performance optimization across our portal ecosystem. This role is critical to ensuring the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our systems, with a strong emphasis on AWS infrastructure, observability, automation and AI-assisted engineering practices.

The Senior Lead SRE requires an AI-native mindset, understands the software development lifecycle (from coding to support) and applies modern AI tools to enhance productivity, quality, and operational excellence. This role will shape how Lumen combines the latest technologies, including AI-driven automation, to modernize software delivery and application lifecycle management.

This role will collaborate with key stakeholders across the engineering organization — including product owners, developers, and testers — to design, optimize, and automate business and technical processes, while effectively navigating multiple teams within a large and complex organization.

Location

This role is designated as a fully remote position within the United States.

The Main Responsibilities

Production Support & Incident Management

• Help define and improve the processes and best practices for incident management within the customer facing applications.
• Implement AI systems and automations to assist during ongoing outages and triage potential ones. You will work with the development teams to ensure that they have all the data normally needed during an outage at their fingertips including preliminary analysis by AI.
• Design and implement improved SRE processes to handle incidents. From proactive analysis, faster response, automatic remediation, AI guided analysis, partially automatic root cause analysis.

Performance Optimization

• Monitor system performance and proactively identify bottlenecks or degradation using AI-driven observability and anomaly detection tools.
• Implement tuning strategies across application layers, databases, and infrastructure.
• Drive initiatives to improve latency, throughput, and resource utilization.

Monitoring & Observability

• Deploy improved alerting for Lumen Connect in depth, focusing on outside in but including early indicators for fulfilment and other areas. Combining traditional monitoring with AI-based anomaly detection and noise reduction.
• Proactively monitor the errors and performance on Lumen Connect. Implement rules to detect deviations, implement improvements together with the teams.
• Design and maintain dashboards, alerts, and metrics using tools like Datadog, AppInsights, CloudWatch, or similar.

Automation & Infrastructure as Code

• Develop and maintain automation scripts and tools for deployment, scaling, and recovery, leveraging AI-assisted code generation and validation tools.
• Use Terraform, or similar IaC tools to manage AWS resources.

Reliability Engineering

• Perform an in-depth analysis of the overall system and its dependencies, implementing techniques to increase the global availability, reduce the reliance on unstable dependencies and guide ecosystem improvements.
• Champion SRE principles such as SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Advocate for resilient architecture and fault-tolerant design patterns, incorporating AI-assisted design reviews and architecture evaluation.
• Help define and improve better SRE processes and lead significant improvements in reliability for the Lumen Connect platform.

Collaboration & Communication

• Work closely with software engineers, DevOps, and product teams to align reliability goals.
• Document processes, runbooks, and best practices for knowledge sharing.
• Provide mentorship and guidance on reliability and operational excellence.

What We Look For in a Candidate

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years overall professional experience in SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering roles.
• Experience with Terraform, or similar IaC tools to manage Cloud resources.
• Proficiency in scripting languages (Python, Bash, etc.) and automation frameworks.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and tools like GitHub Actions, Jenkins or GitLab CI.
• Solid understanding of monitoring and logging tools (e.g., CloudWatch, ELK, Datadog).
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Excellent AI and problem-solving skills, and a proactive mindset.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in AWS services (EC2, CloudFront, EKS, RDS, S3, etc.).
• Certifications in AWS or related technologies are a plus.
• Experience of application development using Java Microservices and Spring Boot framework.
• Experience with Agile/SCRUM Methodologies and development practices.

Compensation

This information reflects the anticipated base salary range for this position based on current national data. Minimums and maximums may vary based on location. Individual pay is based on skills, experience and other relevant factors.

Location Based Pay Ranges

• $132,232 - $176,310 in these states: AL AR AZ FL GA IA ID IN KS KY LA ME MO MS MT ND NE NM OH OK PA SC SD TN UT VT WI WV WY
• $138,844 - $185,124 in these states: CO HI MI MN NC NH NV OR RI
• $145,456 - $193,940 in these states: AK CA CT DC DE IL MA MD NJ NY TX VA WA

Lumen offers a comprehensive package featuring a broad range of Health, Life, Voluntary Lifestyle benefits and other perks that enhance your physical, mental, emotional and financial wellbeing. We're able to answer any additional questions you may have about our bonus structure (short-term incentives, long-term incentives and/or sales compensation) as you move through the selection process.

Life at Lumen

Life at Lumen is human and connected, even in a fast moving, AI‑focused organization. We set clear expectations and trust people to meet them. With real support and shared accountability, teams collaborate better, move faster, and deliver meaningful outcomes. Our Lumen 8 behaviors guide how we interact, make decisions, and work together, shaping a culture built to perform and win.

Background Screening

If you are selected for a position, there will be a background screen, which may include checks for criminal records and/or motor vehicle reports and/or drug screening, depending on the position requirements. For more information on these checks, please refer to the Post Offer section of our FAQ page. Job-related concerns identified during the background screening may disqualify you from the new position or your current role. Background results will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Equal Employment Opportunities

We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all persons regardless of race, color, ancestry, citizenship, national origin, religion, veteran status, disability, genetic characteristic or information, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, family status, pregnancy, or other legally protected status (collectively, “protected statuses”). We do not tolerate unlawful discrimination in any employment decisions, including recruiting, hiring, compensation, promotion, benefits, discipline, termination, job assignments or training.

Privacy Notice

Lumen is committed to protecting the privacy and security of personal information collected during the recruitment and hiring process. Our Applicant Privacy Notice explains how we collect, use, disclose, and protect applicant information, as well as how individuals may request access to or deletion of their personal data.

Disclaimer

The job responsibilities described above indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not intended to include a comprehensive inventory of all duties and responsibilities for this job. Job duties and responsibilities are subject to change based on evolving business needs and conditions.