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
Lumen's Network as a Service (NaaS) platform delivers on-demand networking at scale. As Lead SRE, you'll own the reliability of that platform - partnering with operations teams and development counterparts to drive technical direction and resolve systemic issues across a broad range of network topologies and applications.
You'll be accountable for platform observability, incident management, and automation, and you'll coordinate across architecture, engineering, and systems development organizations to measurably improve reliability. You'll also use AI and agentic tooling to build utilities that accelerate deployment automation, platform administration, and incident investigation.
Success in this role draws on networking fundamentals, cloud platforms, software development and troubleshooting methodology, and a bias toward automating what you'd otherwise do twice. We're looking for a change maker - someone who sees where the platform should go next and drives meaningful impact for the customers who rely on it
Location
This role is designated as a fully remote position within the United States.
The Main Responsibilities
- Reliability & Observability
- Serve as subject matter expert for network automation platform applications, services, and hosting environments
- Build and maintain the observability stack: instrument services, collect and curate metrics, and create dashboards and visualizations that make system health obvious at a glance
- Define and tune proactive alerting so issues surface before customers feel them
- Champion core SRE principles - SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets - and advocate for resilient, fault tolerant architecture
- Incident Management
- Participate in an on-call rotation and lead incident response for service outages and unplanned downtime
- Drive blameless postmortems and root cause analysis; own follow-up actions through to completion
- Prevent recurrence through process improvements, tooling, and knowledge sharing across teams
- Automation & Infrastructure
- Automate deployment pipelines (CI/CD) and cloud infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and configuration using infrastructure as code
- Develop tools and utilities that reduce toil and empower operations and development teams to manage services independently
- Apply AI-assisted and agentic workflows to development, support, and investigation work
- Collaboration & Leadership
- Collaborate with cross-functional development teams to support, enhance, and scale NaaS applications
- Provide guidance and mentorship to junior engineers
- Maintain clear documentation for processes and architecture
What We Look For in a Candidate
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in engineering, computer science, or related field.
- 8+ years in software development, systems engineering, and/or networking
- 5+ years of related experience required.
- Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including compute, networking, and identity services
- Strong automation and infrastructure-as-code skills: Terraform, Ansible, and Python
- Experience running containerized workloads on Kubernetes
- Working knowledge of modern observability and monitoring tooling (e.g., Datadog, CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus), including building dashboards and defining alerts
- Demonstrated experience with incident management and blameless postmortems
- Comfort using AI-assisted development and agentic tools as part of daily engineering practice
- Understanding of network technologies including Internet, Ethernet, IPVPN, Edge Compute, and Optical transport
- Strong listening and communication skills; able to operate with autonomy while knowing when to escalate
Preferred Qualifications:
- Multi-cloud experience across AWS, Azure, and GCP
- Asynchronous programming concepts and distributed systems design
- Zero-downtime deployment strategies
- High availability and multi-region architectures
- Source control and CI/CD practices at scale
- Experience applying agentic workflows to operational support and investigation
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
$105,786 - $141,047 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
$111,074 - $148,099 in these states: CO HI MI MN NC NH NV OR RI
$116,364 - $155,152 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. Learn more about Lumen's:Benefits
Requisition #: 343429
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.
To learn more about Life at Lumen and how we live the Lumen 8, please visit:
https://jobs.lumen.com/global/en/life-at-lumen
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.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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.
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To review Lumen’s Global Employment Applicant and Talent Community Privacy Notice, please visit:
https://jobs.lumen.com/global/en/privacy-notice
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.
In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.
Please be advised that Lumen does not require any form of payment from job applicants during the recruitment process. All legitimate job openings will be posted on our official website or communicated through official company email addresses. If you encounter any job offers that request payment in exchange for employment at Lumen, they are not for employment with us, but may relate to another company with a similar name.