SRE Technical Architect

We currently have a career opportunity for an SRE Architect to join our team located in Ft Mill / Charlotte, NC Area.  While the majority of the team is located here, the successful candidate can be located anywhere in the continental US with preference being the EST / CST zones.

Job Overview:

Join Perficient as an SRE Architect to instrument mission-critical systems, build golden-signal dashboards, and close gaps across our enterprise observability landscape. In this role you will own end-to-end telemetry—from services to front-end—so teams can ship faster and operate with confidence.

The SRE Technical Architect provides technology direction, ensures project implementation compliance, and utilizes technology research to innovate, integrate, and manage technology solutions. As a Technology Architect, you will significantly contribute to identifying best-fit architectural solutions for one or more projects; you will collaborate with some of the best talent in the industry to create and implement innovative high quality solutions, participate in Sales and various pursuits focused on our clients' business needs. This role is considered part of the Business Unit Leadership team and may mentor Junior Architects and /or development team members.

Perficient is always looking for the best and brightest talent and we need you! We’re a quickly-growing, global digital consulting leader, and we’re transforming the world’s largest enterprises and biggest brands. You’ll work with the latest technologies, expand your skills, and become a part of our global community of talented, diverse, and knowledgeable colleagues.

• At least 12 years of professional experience required.
• Define reference architectures for high availability, disaster recovery (DR), multi-region/zone deployments, and fault tolerance. 
• Architect end-to-end observability: logs, metrics, traces, profiling, and actionable alerting; standardize telemetry schemas and dashboards. 
• Establish SLOs/SLIs and error budget policies across services; align reliability goals to customer experience and business KPIs. 
• Lead reliability roadmaps, standards, and guardrails (operational readiness reviews, production readiness checklists). 
• Implement runbooks, playbooks, and automated diagnostics; enforce alert hygiene (signal/noise, on-call ergonomics). 
• Define incident response patterns (SEV classification, comms, postmortems, learning reviews) and statistical analysis of incident trends. 
• Own instrumentation across services and UIs: back-ends and Angular front-end apps, ensuring high-quality traces, metrics, and logs with context propagation. 
• Instrument gateways and mesh: AWS API Gateway, Kong API Gateway, and Kong Mesh to capture request/response telemetry, service health, and mesh traffic. 
• Integrate identity flows: ForgeRock (Access Management / Identity) telemetry for authn/authz journeys and error paths. 
• Automate pipelines: Implement observability steps in GitHub Actions (build, test, deploy) to validate telemetry in CI/CD and block non-compliant releases. 
• Tooling: Leverage Dynatrace OneAgent or OpenTelemetry (enterprise production experience required) to collect signals, normalize, and ship to approved backends. 
• Dashboards & golden signals: Create durable dashboards oriented to the four golden signals—latency, traffic, errors, saturation—plus service availability, dependency health, and user experience.
• Gap analysis & backlog creation: Identify gaps (e.g., missing SLIs, low trace coverage, noisy logs), write actionable project tasks / stories, and partner with dev, SRE, and security to drive closure.
•  Reliability practices: Define/maintain SLIs/SLOs, alert thresholds, runbooks, and error budgets; collaborate on incident reviews and trend analysis. 
• Enablement: Coach product teams on instrumentation patterns, standards, and SDK usage to scale observability autonomously.

• Enterprise production experience with Dynatrace OneAgent or OpenTelemetry (services and user interfaces). 
• Proven ability to instrument .NET services and Angular front-end applications (RUM, distributed tracing, log correlation). 
• Hands-on with AWS API Gateway, Kong API, and Kong Mesh (metrics, traces, health checks, and policy events). 
• Experience instrumenting ForgeRock flows and integrating identity telemetry. 
• CI/CD proficiency with GitHub Actions—adding quality gates for telemetry, linting configs, and secrets management. 
• Strong grasp of golden signals, SLI/SLO design, and practical alerting (avoiding alert fatigue).
• Ability to work autonomously and drive cross-functional change through clear documentation and backlog tasks. 
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, HTTP, and cloud networking fundamentals. 
• Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and support data-informed task execution.
• Familiarity with AI-enhanced platforms is a plus.
• A solid understanding of AI capabilities and limitations including ethical considerations is expected.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field of study.

Preferred Qualifications (nice-to-have) 

• Experience with Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, AWS CloudWatch/X-Ray, and log stacks (e.g., OpenTelemetry Collector, OTLP). 
• Knowledge of service mesh telemetry specifics (sidecar proxies, mTLS, traffic policies). 
• IaC tooling (e.g., Terraform) for observability resources and dashboards as code. 
• Prior work with digital identity and ForgeRock admin/SDKs. • Familiarity with Dynatrace (dashboards, Davis AI, topology modeling) or vendor-neutral patterns to avoid lock-in.
• Master's degree in computer science or related field of study.

About the team

Our App Modernization team helps businesses transform legacy systems and build future-ready applications. We deliver end-to-end solutions—combining cloud migration, custom application development, multi-cloud strategies, and modern UI and API integration. With expertise in DevSecOps, modern frameworks, and enterprise platforms, our team of engineers, architects, and project leaders partner with leading brands to drive innovation, accelerate delivery, and create lasting business impact. We also integrate AI-driven capabilities—such as intelligent automation, predictive analytics, and generative development tools—to enhance scalability, performance, and user experience.  

Perficient, Inc. proudly provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or status as a protected veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. Perficient, Inc. complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including, but not limited to, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training. Perficient, Inc. expressly prohibits any form of unlawful employee harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or covered veterans. Improper interference with the ability of Perficient, Inc. employees to perform their expected job duties is absolutely not tolerated.​

Disability Accommodations: Perficient is committed to providing a barrier-free employment process with reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, please contact us.​

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled or the posting is removed.​

The salary range for this position takes into consideration a variety of factors, including but not limited to skill sets, level of experience, applicable office location, training, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs. The new hire salary range displays the minimum and maximum salary targets for this position across all US locations, and the range has not been adjusted for any specific state differentials. It is not typical for a candidate to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role, and compensation decisions are dependent on the unique facts and circumstances regarding each candidate. A reasonable estimate of the current salary range for this position is $81,978.00 to $178,090.00. Please note that the salary range posted reflects the base salary only and does not include benefits or any potential variable compensation programs. Information regarding the benefits available for this position are in our benefits overview. 

Disclaimer:  The above statements are not intended to be a complete statement of job content, rather to act as a guide to the essential functions performed by the employee assigned to this classification.  Management retains the discretion to add or change the duties of the position at any time. 

#LI-GS1 #LI-SREArchitect #LI-AIFirst

Perficient is the global AI-first consultancy. Our team of strategists, designers, technologists, and engineers partners with the world’s most innovative enterprises and admired brands to deliver real business results through the transformative power of AI. As part of our AI-First strategy, we empower every employee to build AI fluency and actively engage with AI tools to drive innovation and efficiency. We break boundaries, obsess over outcomes, and shape the future for our clients. Join a company where bold ideas and brilliant minds converge to redefine what’s possible - while building a career filled with growth, balance, and purpose.