[Remote] Site Reliability Engineer (Contractor)

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Varo Bank is an entirely new kind of bank, all digital and mission-driven. They are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to design, build, and run large-scale, distributed systems while focusing on automation and observability.

Responsibilities

• EKS & Karpenter Management: Manage, upgrade, and autoscale EKS clusters across multiple environments (SIT, UAT, Prod) and AWS accounts
• Infrastructure as Code & GitOps: Write Terraform modules and Helm charts to support GitOps workflows using ArgoCD and GitLab CI/CD pipelines
• Kafka & Data Platform Support: Maintain and troubleshoot Kafka (MSK) clusters, including broker health, connectors, and CDC pipelines
• Observability & Cost Control: Improve observability using Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, and ELK while proactively identifying cloud cost-optimization opportunities
• Automation & AIOps: Automate operational tasks with Python and leverage AI/ML techniques for predictive alerting and intelligent runbooks
• Service Desk & Support: Handle Platform Service Desk requests, including Terraform merge request reviews, access management, and deployment support
• Incident Response & On-Call: Participate in the production on-call rotation, support incident response, and contribute to blameless post-mortems

Skills

• 3+ years of experience in an SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering role, with the ability to work independently and manage multiple workstreams
• Strong hands-on experience with core AWS services, including EKS, EC2, RDS Aurora, MSK, S3, IAM, VPC, and Direct Connect
• Deep production experience with Kubernetes (upgrades, networking, RBAC) alongside Helm and GitOps tools like ArgoCD
• Advanced proficiency with Terraform, including writing modules and managing multi-account/multi-environment states
• Experience supporting and maintaining data platforms such as Airflow, Databricks, EMR, Kafka/MSK, or CDC pipelines
• Solid understanding of networking (VPCs, security groups, Istio, DNS) paired with strong Python scripting skills for tooling and automation
• Experience managing observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK) and effectively leveraging AI/LLM tools for automation and incident analysis
• Experience with Karpenter and KEDA
• GitLab CI/CD pipeline experience
• Hashicorp Vault for secrets management

Benefits

• Remote
• FDIC insured

Company Overview

Varo is an entirely new kind of bank. All digital, mission driven, FDIC insured and designed for the way our customers live their lives. It was founded in 2015, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, US, with a workforce of 501-1000 employees. Its website is https://www.varomoney.com.

Company H1B Sponsorship

Varo Bank has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 6 in 2026, 16 in 2025, 21 in 2024, 17 in 2023, 31 in 2022, 13 in 2021. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.