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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for a High Availability Engineer

💰 $120,000 - $190,000

InfrastructureDevOpsSite Reliability EngineeringCloud EngineeringIT

🎯 Role Definition

A High Availability Engineer is the architect and guardian of system uptime and resilience. This role is fundamentally about proactive engineering to prevent failures and reactive excellence to rapidly resolve them when they occur. Professionals in this field design, build, and maintain fault-tolerant, scalable, and self-healing infrastructure. They are deeply involved in system architecture, disaster recovery planning, performance tuning, and automation, ensuring that services remain operational and performant under any circumstance. This is a mission-critical function that blends deep technical expertise with a strategic mindset, directly impacting business continuity and customer trust.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Engineer / Administrator
  • Software Engineer (with a focus on backend/infrastructure)
  • Network Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Principal High Availability / Site Reliability Engineer
  • Infrastructure Architect
  • Director of Platform Engineering or SRE
  • Cloud Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Architect
  • Cloud Security Engineer
  • Performance and Scalability Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain robust, fault-tolerant, and highly available infrastructure solutions across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments to meet and exceed stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
  • Proactively identify and eliminate single points of failure within the system architecture through rigorous analysis, architectural design reviews, and failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA).
  • Develop, manage, and regularly test comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans, including failover/failback procedures, data backup strategies, and service restoration drills.
  • Engineer and automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment processes using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to ensure consistency and repeatability.
  • Build and operate sophisticated monitoring, logging, and observability platforms to gain deep insights into system health, performance, and user experience, enabling pre-emptive issue detection.
  • Define, measure, and report on key reliability metrics, including Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR), and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).
  • Lead the technical response during high-severity production incidents, driving efficient troubleshooting, root cause analysis (RCA), and the implementation of corrective and preventative actions.
  • Conduct in-depth post-incident reviews (blameless post-mortems) to identify contributing factors and ensure that learnings are translated into concrete improvements in system design and operational processes.
  • Automate routine operational tasks, manual interventions, and recovery procedures through scripting and software development to reduce toil and improve system self-healing capabilities.
  • Partner with software engineering teams throughout the development lifecycle to provide guidance on building reliable, scalable, and observable applications.
  • Perform capacity planning and performance tuning to ensure infrastructure can handle current and future traffic loads efficiently and cost-effectively.
  • Manage and optimize cloud infrastructure costs while maintaining high levels of performance and availability, leveraging tools for cost analysis and reserved instances/savings plans.
  • Implement and manage traffic management solutions, such as global and local load balancers, DNS, and CDNs, to ensure optimal routing and resilience.
  • Evaluate, recommend, and implement new tools and technologies that can enhance the overall reliability, performance, and manageability of the platform.
  • Develop and maintain comprehensive documentation for system architecture, operational procedures, and emergency response playbooks.
  • Participate in an on-call rotation, serving as a primary escalation point for critical system issues and ensuring a swift and effective response 24/7.
  • Design and execute chaos engineering experiments to deliberately inject failure into systems, uncovering hidden weaknesses and validating the effectiveness of resilience mechanisms.
  • Secure infrastructure and services by implementing best practices for access control, network security, vulnerability management, and configuration hardening.
  • Drive the adoption of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and best practices across the engineering organization, fostering a culture of reliability and operational excellence.
  • Manage the availability and replication of critical data stores, including relational databases, NoSQL databases, and distributed caching systems.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and provide expert consultation to development teams on building reliable and scalable services.
  • Contribute to the organization's broader technology strategy and infrastructure roadmap, providing a reliability-focused perspective.
  • Collaborate with business units and product managers to translate uptime and performance requirements into tangible engineering goals.
  • Participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and other agile ceremonies within the infrastructure and SRE teams.
  • Mentor junior engineers and share knowledge on reliability engineering, system design, and incident management best practices.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Deep expertise in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP), including core services for compute, storage, networking, and databases (e.g., EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, Route 53).
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Hands-on mastery of Docker and Kubernetes for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications, including experience with Helm charts.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency with tools like Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation to automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Strong experience with setting up and using monitoring stacks like Prometheus/Grafana, or commercial tools such as Datadog, New Relic, and log aggregation with the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
  • CI/CD Pipelines: In-depth knowledge of building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or CircleCI to automate testing and deployment.
  • Scripting & Automation: Advanced scripting skills in languages such as Python, Go, or Bash for automating operational tasks and building internal tools.
  • Networking Fundamentals: Solid understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, load balancing (L4/L7), firewalls, and virtual networking in the cloud.
  • Database Administration: Experience with the high-availability and disaster recovery features of both SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., Cassandra, Redis, MongoDB) databases.
  • Linux/Unix Systems: Expert-level knowledge of Linux/Unix operating systems, including performance tuning, troubleshooting, and security hardening.
  • Incident Management: Proven ability to lead and troubleshoot during high-pressure production incidents, with a strong grasp of root cause analysis methodologies.

Soft Skills

  • Analytical Problem-Solving: Ability to systematically diagnose complex, distributed system issues and identify robust, long-term solutions.
  • Calm Under Pressure: A resilient and composed demeanor, especially during critical incidents, enabling clear thinking and effective leadership.
  • Ownership & Accountability: A strong sense of personal responsibility for system health and a commitment to seeing issues through to resolution.
  • Collaborative Communication: Excellent ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, both verbally and in writing.
  • Strategic Thinking: The capacity to think beyond immediate problems and design systems for long-term scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
  • Empathy: An understanding of the impact of downtime on users and the business, driving a passionate commitment to reliability.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's Degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience demonstrating deep infrastructure and systems expertise.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's Degree in a relevant field.
  • Industry certifications in cloud platforms (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect) or Kubernetes (e.g., CKA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5-10 years of progressive experience in roles like Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Systems Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering.

Preferred:

  • Proven experience managing large-scale, distributed, 24/7 production environments.
  • A demonstrated track record of tangibly improving system reliability, performance, and uptime through engineering efforts.
  • Deep, hands-on experience in a cloud-native environment, leveraging automation and Infrastructure as Code.
  • Experience working within a mature SRE or DevOps culture with an emphasis on blameless post-mortems and proactive reliability work.
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