Senior Site Reliability Engineer Lead

Job Summary

The Real Time Payments International team is looking for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to drive application deployment readiness, manage day-to-day operational stability and support the reliability of critical payment platforms by implementing automation, leverage best practices and work with a high-impact team responsible for driving production readiness, reliability, and DevOps automation across Mastercard platforms.

This role plays a key part in incident management, change readiness, and platform operations, while contributing to continuous improvement initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Operations & Stability

• Support end-to-end availability, monitoring, and performance of critical payment platforms.
• Execute operational processes to ensure platform health and stability.
• Participate in capacity checks, readiness validations, and environment monitoring.

Incident Management & Execution

• Actively manage and coordinate incident triage and resolution.
• Serve as incident commander driving medium to high-severity incidents.
• Ensure timely updates, accurate impact assessment, and appropriate escalation.
• Contribute to root cause analysis with clear identification of actions and ownership.

Change & Release Support

• Participate in highlighting gaps and defining test cases required for a change in lower environments and validate lower environment test completeness.
• Ensure adherence to change governance processes (test case reviews, checklists, approvals, rollback readiness).
• Engage in creating change plans and support execution of production changes, deployments, and validations.

Technical Troubleshooting

• Perform hands-on troubleshooting across:
  • Application behaviour and dependencies.
  • Infrastructure components (compute, network, storage).
  • Database and performance issues.
• Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure and other technical teams to isolate and resolve issues efficiently.

Monitoring & Observability

• Improve system health monitoring using observability tools and alerts.
• Identify gaps in alerting and contribute to improving quality of alerting and dashboards.
• Ensure proactive detection of anomalies using observability tools.

Automation & Process Improvement

• Contribute to automation initiatives to reduce toil and errors.
• Identify repetitive operational tasks and drive improvements.
• Support implementation of DevOps best practices.
• Leverage AI-driven tools to improve monitoring, incident detection, and operational efficiency, enabling faster troubleshooting and reduced manual effort in day-to-day operations.

Stakeholder Coordination

• Work closely with engineering, program teams, and external partners during incidents and changes.
• Provide structured updates to stakeholders with clarity and consistency.
• Ensure alignment during critical activities.

Risk Identification

• Highlight operational and platform risks including test coverage gaps, infrastructure constraints, dependency risks.
• Escalate issues proactively and support mitigation tracking.

Team Contribution & Mentorship

• Support onboarding and guidance of junior team members.
• Contribute to runbooks, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Drive consistency in execution and adherence to operational standards.

Success in This Role Looks Like:

• Deep Operational Ownership (“Built to Run” Mindset)

A successful Lead SRE Engineer is fully accountable for the operational health of their program, not just responsive to incidents.

• Monitoring, alerting, and dashboards that reflect real customer impact.
• Emergency response and incident leadership, including clear communications and post-incident follow-ups.
• Capacity planning and readiness aligned with product and business growth.
• Change management discipline, ensuring safe, compliant releases.

2.Strong Technical & System-Level Understanding

A Lead SRE Engineer is expected to operate at system dependency level, not just ticket or tool level.

• Have a strong understanding of application business logic and workflows.
• Have a clear grasp of upstream/downstream dependencies.
• Expertise in observability (alerts, dashboards, synthetic monitoring).
• Ability to drive automation to reduce manual toil and recurring issues.
• End to End ownership of tasks and activities.

3. Incident Leadership & Decision-Making Under Pressure

Beyond technical skill, Leads are distinguished by how they lead during high-severity situations.

• Takes command of major incidents, not waiting to be asked.
• Maintains calm, structured communication with engineering, product, and leadership.
• Balances speed vs risk in decision-making.
• Ensures clear ownership of actions, timelines, and follow-ups.
• Drives root cause analysis and systemic fixes, not just recovery.

4. Proactive Risk & Reliability Engineering

A successful Lead SRE prevents incidents more than fight them.

• Identifies systemic risks before they become outages.
• Pushes for design, monitoring, or process improvements.
• Challenges “tribal knowledge” by insisting on documentation and runbooks.
• Drives improvements aligned with operational maturity models.

5. Leadership Without Formal Authority

Lead SRE Engineers often lead without being people managers, which requires strong influence skills.

• Mentors and coaches senior and mid-level SRE’s.
• Sets the technical and behavioural bar for the team.
• Gives clear, constructive feedback.
• Acts as a role model for ownership, urgency, and professionalism.
• Builds trust with Engineering, Product, and Platform teams.
• Flexibile in terms of working hours where needed.

6. Excellent Cross-Functional Communication

SRE Leads sit at the intersection of technology, operations, and business.

• Translating technical issues into business impact to communicate clearly with senior stakeholders during incidents.
• Setting expectations early and transparently with junior team members.
• Represents SRE confidently in planning, reviews, and retrospectives,
• Ensuring post-incident learnings are shared and acted upon.

7. Continuous Learning & Product Mastery

A Lead SRE Engineer is expected to continuously deepen product and platform knowledge.

• Actively closing knowledge gaps in their program by driving learning within the team.
• Staying current with platform changes, dependencies, and risks.
• Ensuring knowledge is documented and reusable, not person-dependent.

Skill Requirements

• Need staff at L7 and L8 level ; India and Dublin shift (7 am to 3 pm and 3 to 11pm)

o The skillset is purely for Prod support (ITSM process experience), with SRE mindset (problem solving skills)

o Good Communication skills - as there is need to resolve the issues by collaborating across different teams

o Need basic Shell scripting knowledge

o Need DB skills (Joins and queries to analyse data)

o Need Splunk and Dynatrace knowledge - querying and graph creation for analysis and problem solving

o Tech stack in app landscape: Jenkins, AWS, Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), Postgres, Oracle, Casandra, Kafka, Amazon Cloudwatch

o Applications are related to Authorization and Clearing ; domain knowledge would be a plus but not mandatory.

Other Requirements

1.Relevant certifications in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or Cloud Services are a plus.