Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Ahold Delhaize USA, a division of global food retailer Ahold Delhaize, is part of the U.S. family of brands, which includes five leading omnichannel grocery brands – Food Lion, Giant Food, The GIANT Company, Hannaford and Stop & Shop. Our associates support the brands with a wide range of services, including Finance, Legal, Sustainability, Commercial, Digital and E-commerce, Technology and more.

Primary Purpose

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) IV is a senior technical leader responsible for designing, guiding, and scaling site reliability engineering practices across complex, distributed systems. This role plays a crucial part in driving operational excellence, ensuring system resiliency, and fostering a high-performing engineering culture. The SRE IV works closely with senior leadership, engineering, and product teams to set strategic goals around availability, performance, and incident response while leading large-scale reliability initiatives.

This position emphasizes deep technical expertise in platforms such as Spring Boot, Java, Tomcat, Redis, and Kafka, along with infrastructure tooling like AKS, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and observability platforms like Datadog. The ideal candidate will also bring strong experience working with Ubuntu/Linux environments, containerization with Docker, and automation of operational workflows across a modern DevOps toolchain.

Our flexible/hybrid work schedule includes 3 in-person days at one of our Chicago, IL office and 2 remote days.

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Architect, evolve, and lead implementation of enterprise-level SRE frameworks, tools, and cloud-native reliability strategies.
• Build, scale, and manage microservices platforms using Spring Boot, Java, Tomcat, and Redis with Kubernetes and AKS.
• Lead technical design reviews, chaos testing, and infrastructure planning with an emphasis on scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance.
• Define, implement, and refine SLOs/SLIs and operational health indicators for business-critical services.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and application deployment workflows using Terraform, GitHub Actions, and ArgoCD.
• Drive observability and telemetry adoption using Datadog, including dashboards, alerts, custom metrics, and distributed tracing.
• Act as incident commander during critical production issues; conduct blameless postmortems and guide root cause remediation.
• Lead cross-team efforts in reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and resolve (MTTR), and promoting self-healing systems.
• Partner with security and compliance teams to ensure that systems are secure, auditable, and operationally compliant.
• Enhance service resiliency through strategies including Kafka-based event-driven architecture, retries, rate limiting, and circuit breakers.
• Mentor junior SREs and engineers, lead technical communities of practice, and promote a culture of continuous improvement.
• Maintain and improve Ubuntu-based production systems and containerized workloads with Docker.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging DevOps technologies to support scalability and reliability objectives.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; equivalent practical experience may be considered.
• 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Platform Engineering roles in large-scale production environments.
• Expertise in building and maintaining Java-based microservices using Spring Boot, Tomcat, and Redis in containerized deployments.
• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, AKS, and ArgoCD for orchestration and GitOps deployment workflows.
• Proficiency in Python, Java, Bash, or Go for automation, scripting, and infrastructure tooling.
• Proven ability to implement observability platforms and practices using Datadog (metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts).
• Advanced experience working with CI/CD pipelines using GitHub and GitHub Actions.
• Deep understanding of networking, Linux (especially Ubuntu), distributed systems, and container security.
• Experience operating message-driven architectures using Kafka, with an emphasis on throughput, retries, and resilience.
• Solid knowledge of Terraform and infrastructure as code best practices.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and stakeholder alignment skills across engineering and business teams.

Salary Range: $146,960 - $220,440 

Actual compensation offered to a candidate may vary based on their unique qualifications and experience, internal equity, and market conditions. Final compensation decisions will be made in accordance with company policies and applicable laws. 

#LI-CW1 #LI-Hybrid

#LI-CW1 #LI-Hybrid

At Ahold Delhaize USA, we provide services to one of the largest portfolios of grocery companies in the nation, and we're actively seeking top talent. Our team shares a common motivation to drive change, take ownership and enable our brands to better care for their customers. We thrive on supporting great local grocery brands and their strategies.

We offer an experience where our associates are valued; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging are infused in our business and our employees are representative of the communities that we serve. We believe in total wellness, which encompasses a blend of physical, financial and emotional wellness.

We believe in collaboration, curiosity, and continuous learning in all that we think, create and do. While building a culture where personal and professional growth are just as important as business growth, we invest in our people, empowering them to learn, grow and deliver at all levels of the business.