---
title: 'Senior Site Reliability Engineer (DevOps) at Focus'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-site-reliability-engineer-devops-focus-remote-aqgsfee6q17k'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Senior Site Reliability Engineer (DevOps) at Focus

- **Company:** Focus
- **Location:** Remote
- **Compensation:** $135k–$175k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/focus/b1a6a6c1-4c70-4062-8210-56ccb0f33afe

## Job description

## About Focus

[Focus](https://focusconsulting.io/) is a digital services firm dedicated to delivering on projects with impact in the civic tech space. We partner with states and federal agencies—including the Department of State, IRS, and the Department of Education—transform outdated systems into modern, efficient solutions that deliver better outcomes for citizens.

At Focus, we believe in doing impactful work while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. We encourage our team to log off at the end of the day, take time off when needed, and bring their best selves to work. We are intentional about staying on the cutting edge of our tooling and practices—from modern cloud development environments to integrating AI into our daily workflows—so our engineers spend their time solving hard problems, not fighting dull tools.

We are a fully remote company, and all employees must be based in the continental U.S. Some projects may require occasional travel, approximately 1-2 times per year.

## Role Overview

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will own the reliability, deployability, and observability of complex, multi-vendor government platforms running in secure environments. You will build and maintain infrastructure as code in Terraform, design CI/CD pipelines, establish monitoring practices, and recommend SLOs to define and support system health. You’ll work closely with product teams, client stakeholders, and partner organizations, bringing SRE and DevOps practices to environments that are often in the middle of modernization.

## Responsibilities

- Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform, including reusable modules and patterns that other teams can adopt.
- Build and improve CI/CD pipelines that support frequent, low-risk releases, with automated testing, security scanning, and promotion across environments.
- Define and track SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for critical services, and use them to guide reliability priorities and release decisions.
- Implement observability through metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and actionable alerts.
- Lead incident response and blameless postmortems, and drive follow-up work to completion. Participate in an on-call rotation as needed by the engagement.
- Troubleshoot complex, distributed systems across infrastructure, application, and network layers.
- Embed security and compliance into infrastructure and delivery, including vulnerability management, patching, secrets management, and support for ATO and continuous monitoring processes.
- Automate operational toil with scripts and tooling in languages such as Python, Go, or TypeScript.
- Serve as a technical advisor to client stakeholders, translating reliability and infrastructure tradeoffs into clear recommendations.
- Mentor teammates through code and infrastructure reviews, pairing, and documented runbooks and standards.

## Skills & Qualifications

- 5+ years of professional experience in SRE, DevOps, platform, or cloud infrastructure engineering.
- Significant hands-on experience with Terraform in production, including module design, state management, and running plan/apply workflows through CI.
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins).
- Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language, such as Python, Go, or TypeScript.
- Experience with observability tools (e.g., DataDog, CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus) and with designing meaningful alerts.
- Experience with containers and container orchestration (e.g., Docker, ECS, Kubernetes).
- Familiarity with FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, or ATO processes.
- Experience supporting legacy modernization or cloud migration efforts.
- Familiarity with AWS GovCloud environments, FedRAMP compliance standards, and observability tooling such as DataDog.

## Requirements

- Legal authorization to work in the United States
- Ability to meet any other requirements for government contracts for which candidates are hired
- Work authorization that doesn’t require visa sponsorship, now or in the future
- May be subject to a government background check or security clearance, depending on the contract

## About Focus

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Focus is a digital services firm that builds resilient adjudication and payment systems for government agencies, ensuring claimants get key benefits on time.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: Washington, DC, USA
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Ant Addis

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Government Digital Services, Benefits & Social Programs, Healthcare Technology
- **Target customers**: Federal and state government agencies (B2G), including the U.S. Department of State, IRS, CMS, CDC, HHS, and the states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Minnesota.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build enduring digital services that people and government depend on, reducing burden and simplifying policy.

## Products & Services
- **Digital Modernization**: Modernizing legacy systems by reducing delivery risk early, working through integration constraints, and creating a path from fragile platforms to resilient services. Examples include passport renewals (mobile-first, fully accessible system taking 6 minutes to apply) and the FAFSA loan program.
- **Adjudicated Benefits**: Researching, designing, and delivering benefits programs that depend on complex eligibility rules, operational consistency, and case handling. This includes systems for Massachusetts Paid Leave, MA Childcare, MN Paid Leave, and NJ Unemployment.
- **AI & Emerging Technologies**: Helping agencies apply AI where it improves service delivery in real workflows, with clear evaluation criteria and strong operational controls. Examples include using LLMs to deliver policy guidance to adjudicators and conducting deep research across legislation.
- **Security & Compliance**: Integrating security into delivery from the beginning, achieving ATOs (e.g., for the U.S. Department of State's cloud infrastructure platform), and embedding security into end-to-end testing.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total benefits processed: $4.5+ billion; total users served: 2 million+
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Member of the Digital Services Coalition; partnership network includes Nava PBC (including an 8(a) joint venture).
- **Growth Signals**: The firm has grown to a 50+ person team since founding in 2019. It has expanded its state-level engagements (Massachusetts, New Jersey, Minnesota) and federal work (State Department, IRS, CMS, CDC, HHS). Recent projects include modernizing the passport adjudication system and the Grant.gov system.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep Government Expertise**: Specialized in the complex, high-stakes world of government benefits and adjudication systems, a niche with high barriers to entry.
- **Outcomes-Based Approach**: Measures success by real service improvements and program outcomes, not billable hours or output, aligning incentives with client success.
- **Lean & Senior-Led Model**: A 50+ person firm that puts senior practitioners on every engagement, combining the scale to handle large systems with the agility of a smaller team.
- **Strong Ecosystem Partnerships**: Part of the Digital Services Coalition and has a strategic joint venture with Nava PBC, allowing it to combine strengths for larger contracts.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Modernizing critical government benefits and adjudication systems at federal scale (e.g., FAFSA, passport renewals, Grant.gov). Expanding AI capabilities in a safe, controlled manner to improve service delivery. Building internal capacity within client agencies through knowledge transfer.
- **Direction for growth**: Deepening existing state and federal relationships while expanding to new agencies and programs. Continuing to build the "modern collaboration ecosystem" for government digital services.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: Values include "Outcomes Over Output," "Trusted Public Stewards," "Managers of One," and "Problems before Solutions." The firm emphasizes sustainable pace, deep collaboration, and high standards without burnout. Teams are small, decisions are made close to the work, and people are trusted to own what they build.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Fully remote within the continental US.
- **Notable perks**:
    - Competitive salary (benchmarked to Washington DC market) with transparent levels and salary bands.
    - 26 days off per year (15 days PTO + 11 federal holidays).
    - Unlimited sick time.
    - Up to 12 weeks of fully paid parental or medical leave.
    - 100% company-paid life, short-term, and long-term disability insurance.
    - Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
    - Pre-tax FSA and dependent care assistance program (DCAP).
    - 401(k) through Human Interest.
    - $1,000 annual professional development budget.
    - Discretionary yearly bonus based on performance and company outcomes.
- **Hiring process**: Transparent and efficient, typically taking two weeks from first session to offer. Includes an introductory call, a behavioral interview, and a technical interview (take-home exercise for engineers; project scenario for others).

## Sources
1. [focusconsulting.io](https://focusconsulting.io/)
2. [focusconsulting.io/about-focus/](https://focusconsulting.io/about-focus/)
3. [focusconsulting.io/careers/](https://focusconsulting.io/careers/)
4. [focusconsulting.io/capabilities/](https://focusconsulting.io/capabilities/)
5. [focusconsulting.io/contact/](https://focusconsulting.io/contact/)

## Other roles at Focus

- [Join Our Talent Network – Future Opportunities: Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/join-our-talent-network-future-opportunities-engineering-focus-remote-ae1gx4athdca)
- [Join Our Talent Network – Future Opportunities: Design](https://feeny.ai/job/join-our-talent-network-future-opportunities-design-focus-remote-ey5ce7r302ez)