Site Reliability Engineer at GovCIO
Arlington, VA
$230,000–$250,000from the description
Jul 24, 2026
Arlington, VA
Jul 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Site Reliability Engineer role focused on keeping mission-critical government systems stable, scalable, and highly available. Day-to-day work spans designing production infrastructure, defining service-level objectives, automating operational processes, building observability tooling, leading incident response, and collaborating with development teams on reliability improvements. Suits experienced infrastructure and cloud engineers comfortable with Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and scripting, who hold an active Secret clearance.
Senior level · 5+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · Secret clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $158,337 (middle half $126,441–$180,105). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (10)
The qualifications block states 'Bachelor's with 12+ years of infrastructure/cloud engineering experience (or commensurate experience)' — the 'or commensurate experience' clause means no formal degree is hard-gated, so the degree requirement is set to None.
The Required Skills block lists '5–10+ years of engineering experience'; the lower bound of 5 years is used as the overall years minimum, though the posting also references 12+ years in the qualifications preamble — the two figures are inconsistent, and the 5-year floor from the Required Skills section is treated as the operative gate.
Cloud infrastructure is required but no specific cloud platform is named in the Required Skills section; AWS and Azure appear only under Preferred Skills (certifications). The cloud platform skill is captured from the required section as a generic gate with common alternatives (AWS, Azure, GCP).
AWS and Azure certifications appear under Preferred Skills and Experience, so they are marked preferred.
Kubernetes certifications and DevOps certifications are listed under Preferred Skills and are marked preferred.
Go is listed alongside Python as an alternative scripting language ('such as Python and Go'), so it is captured as an alternative to Python rather than a separate required skill.
The role is hybrid (not fully remote) based in Arlington, VA.
An active Secret clearance is a hard gate; DEA suitability is also required post-hire.
The SRE role is classified as 15-1252 (Software Developers) given the emphasis on writing automation, developing monitoring/observability solutions, and engineering reliability tooling. 15-1244 is noted as a plausible alternative given the infrastructure operations scope.
Requires a Secret clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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