Site Reliability Engineer (For independent contractors)

Why we are hiring

Staff augmentation to accelerate a strategic shift in how ADS runs its managed data services. We are moving DynamoDB from a decentralised model (customer teams run everything in their own AWS accounts; the platform team only ships Terraform modules) into a Governed operating model where NoSQL has an operating role in the customer account via cross-account IAM, builds a control plane for the fleet, and offers a self-service surface. The same pattern will later extend to the rest of the ADS portfolio.

Role shape

Hands-on platform engineer, not a traditional ops SRE. You own production systems, understand how they behave at scale, automate operational work, and improve the platform rather than operate it ticket by ticket.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate highly available NoSQL infrastructure and platform services, primarily around DynamoDB.

  
  

• Build Governed-model capabilities: cross-account IAM roles, module rollout tooling, live estate inventory, SOx evidence collection, break-glass access.

  
  

• Develop reusable Terraform modules and software-engineering-grade automation.

  
  

• Operate workloads across many AWS accounts (one per consumer team) and environments.

  
  

• Work with AWS primitives: IAM, VPC and networking, EC2, KMS, CloudWatch, multi-account org tooling.

  
  

• Automate provisioning, configuration, upgrades, remediation, and routine operational tasks. A recent module upgrade cost roughly 8.5 person-days across 15 consumer teams for a 1-2 day code change; your job is to make that number collapse.

  
  

• Improve observability, alerting, incident response, SLOs, and operational readiness.

  
  

• Diagnose production issues across applications, databases, Linux, networking, and AWS.

  
  

• Contribute to migrations and modernisation.

  
  

• Build self-service capabilities and standardised interfaces for the internal engineering teams consuming NoSQL services.

• Participate in design, implementation, code review, testing, deployment, and production support.

What we are looking for

Must have

• 3 to 5 years of production experience building or running distributed systems at meaningful scale.

  
  

• Strong AWS: IAM, VPC and networking, EC2, monitoring, multi-account environments.

  
  

• Strong Terraform (or equivalent Infrastructure-as-Code) experience.

  
  

• Python at a software-engineering level. Go or Java equally acceptable.

  
  

• Strong Linux and production troubleshooting.

  
  

• Observability, incident response, and SRE practice on critical services.

  
  

• Demonstrated bias towards automating operational workflows rather than running manual procedures.

  
  

• Hands-on with at least one production NoSQL or distributed data system: DynamoDB, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, a wide-column store, a distributed key-value store, or similar.

  
  

• Full overlap with Netherlands business hours.

Good to have

• DynamoDB in depth: data modelling, single-table design, partitioning and hot-key behaviour, on-demand vs. provisioned capacity, GSI and LSI, Streams, Global Tables, PITR, backup and restore operational patterns.

  
  

• Agentic SDLC experience: AI-assisted software engineering, coding agents, or automation that uses AI agents across development, testing, review, deployment, incident response, or operational workflows. Strong differentiator for us. A candidate who can bring an agentic workflow to our module rollouts and incident response is of particular interest.

  
  

• Experience building internal platforms or self-service infrastructure for other engineering teams.

  
  

• Large-scale migrations or infrastructure modernisation.

  
  

• Replacing manual operations with APIs, controllers, or automated workflows.

  
  

• Kubernetes.

  
  

• Highly available service design across regions or availability zones.

What good looks like on the resume

Specific, measurable outcomes rather than keyword lists. Examples of the shape of statement we respond to:

• Reduced provisioning time from hours to minutes through automation.

  
  

• Migrated a production datastore of X scale without downtime.

  
  

• Improved availability or MTTR through a specific architectural or operational change.

  
  

• Automated a previously manual upgrade or remediation process, cutting fleet-wide cost by Y.

  
  

• Reduced infrastructure cost by Z with a described approach.

  
  

• Designed a system supporting a clearly described production scale.

  
  

• Shipped an agentic workflow that replaced N hours of manual engineering work per week.

• A list of technologies alone is not sufficient. We are interested in demonstrated engineering ownership and measurable outcomes.

Profile:

You are likely to succeed here if you are comfortable moving between software engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production operations. You enjoy understanding how systems actually behave in production, work through ambiguous infrastructure problems independently, and leave systems more automated and easier to operate than you found them.

Logistics

• 40 hours per week, 8 hours per day.

  
  

• Remote; nearshore candidates welcome. Full overlap with Netherlands business hours required.

  
  

• Start as early as possible. First contract to end of 2026, with the option to extend.

  
  

• Reports into the ADS NoSQL hiring manager.