Site Reliability Engineer Incident Response Lead

Type: 90-Day Contract (W-2)
Location: Jersey City, NJ
Schedule: Hybrid – Onsite Tuesdays and Wednesdays (minimum). Remote the other 3 days.

Duration: 90-day contract, approved through the holiday season. Extension possible.
Start Date: ASAP
Hours / On-Call: 40 hours/week. On-call rotation during the holiday period. After-hours work is paid as approved overtime or offset with comp time.

About the Role

Our client is heading into its busiest season of the year and needs a hands-on SRE to keep its platforms stable through peak holiday traffic. You will own SRE practices for the season and lead incident response when something breaks — running the bridge, driving resolution, and making sure the same problem does not happen twice.

What You'll Do

• Lead incident response during the holiday period: triage, coordinate the bridge, drive resolution, and communicate status to IT leadership and business stakeholders.

• Run blameless post-incident reviews and track corrective actions to closure.

• Define and tune SLIs, SLOs, and alert thresholds for customer-facing and store-supporting systems.

• Build and maintain runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call procedures for the season.

• Improve monitoring, logging, and dashboards so issues are caught before customers notice.

• Lead pre-peak readiness work: capacity checks, change freezes, failover tests, and game-day exercises.

• Automate repetitive operational tasks to reduce toil and speed up recovery.

• Take part in the on-call rotation, including some after-hours and weekend coverage.

What You Bring

• 7+ years in SRE, DevOps, or production operations, with at least 3 years in an SRE role.

• Proven track record leading major incidents (incident commander or equivalent).

• Strong hands-on experience with public cloud — Google Cloud Platform and/or Microsoft Azure.

• Hands-on with observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, Grafana/Prometheus, or similar).

• Scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or PowerShell.

• Working knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar) and CI/CD pipelines.

• Experience with ITSM incident and change processes (ServiceNow or similar).

• Calm under pressure, with clear written and verbal communication.

Nice to Have

• Retail or e-commerce peak-season experience (Black Friday / Cyber Monday).

• Kubernetes / GKE experience.

• Experience supporting POS and store systems.