Site Reliability Engineer
Work Model: Hybrid
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Job Type: Full Time
ABOUT THE ROLE
- That changes what reliability engineering means here, and it makes the role more interesting rather than less. The surface RBC owns the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Edge – origin configuration, WAF, BOT management, TLS, DNS and cache invalidation – together with the release pipeline, the integrations on the page, and the observability practice that has to be built from real-user telemetry and edge logs rather than a traditional server logs. On this platform, page performance is not a quality attribute; it is the product. You will treat it as a service level objective with the same rigor most organizations reserve for uptime.
- You will be the reliability engineer for a public-facing banking website in a regulated environment, working across Adobe vendor, RBC InfoSec, Network and CDN, Privacy, Production Support and a lean full-stack development team.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN
Application Support & Incident Management
- Own end-to-end monitoring of the RBC-controlled surface: CDN and edge configuration, DNS, certificates, cache and invalidation health, and every third-party integration on the page – Search, Consent Management, Analytics, Personalization and AI services and many more to come.
- Build and run synthetic monitoring from outside the bank network, per template, per language, because internal-only monitoring cannot see the CDN, DNS and certificate failures this architecture is most exposed to.
- Run smoke testing of dependent interfaces on every change and maintain the automation packs that do it.
- Participate in the shared on-call rotation as the platform’s subject-matter escalation, and lead incident management for customer-facing events
- Own the vendor's escalation path into Adobe: severity mapping between Adobe and RBC incident scales, named contacts, evidence capture, and holding the vendor to its commitment during an event.
- Handle a class of incident that does not exist on traditional platforms – content published but not visible, invalidation failure, and authoring-source outages – and makes those diagnosable by the service desk rather than by you.
Change and Release reliability:
- Design and operate change management for the platform where the Git repository is production: reconcile a merge-to-main deployment model with RBC change control, so that every production change carries an approved record with stalling delivery.
- Owns the release pipeline as a production control – branch protection, required checks, lint, performance, and secret-screening gates – and the evidence that they are enforced.
- Own rollback: revert, republish and purge, rehearsed end to end with a measured recovery time and a named authority who can call it without convening a meeting
- Treat content publishing as a routine process: hundreds of production changes made by content authors, needing approval evidence, attribution and retention trail
- Represent the platform at change advisory board, and own the freeze calendar interaction and release notes
Business Continuity and Resilience
- Own the recovery obligation that sits with RBC. Adobe operates delivery resiliently, but customers restore their own content from source version history rather than vendor backups – so the content source, the Git repository and the CDN configuration are RBC’s recovery surface, each needs a tested restore.
- Hold CDN and edge configuration as code so that a lost or corrupted property is a redeploy rather than an outage with no runbook
- Define RTO and RPO with the business against the application criticality tier, document the DR exercise plan, and execute the testing – including failure modes you can actually cause: certificate expiry, invalidation failure, WAF misconfiguration, content source unavailability, and repository compromise.
- Maintain the operational resilience evidence a regulator expects for a material third-party technology arrangement, and keep the platform exit and portability plan current.
Reliability & Performance Engineering
- Set and defend service level objectives for both availability and page performance. Define Core Web Vitals thresholds per template, run them on an error budget, and report against them.
- Build the observability practice from the telemetry that exists; real user monitoring on the production domains, CDN access logs streamed to enterprise SIEM as the log source of record, and external synthetics. There is no origin server log – designing around that constraint is part of the job.
- Own third-party scripts and tag governance as a reliability control. Tags are the dominant cause of performance regressions and are added by teams outside engineering change control; you will define the approval route, measure each tag’s cost adn enforce the budget.
- Own capacity and cost where they still exist: CDN egress, asset storage and processing, media delivery and any RBC-hosted APIs behind the page. Capacity planning here is a financial operations discipline, not a server-sized one.
- Publish the reliability and performance reporting that the business, risk and technology leadership use.
Compliance and Control Evidence
- Evidence controls on a platform RBC does not operate – which is harder than evidencing your own, and is where a meaningful share of the role’s effort sits
- Own log ingestion into SIEM with the agreed retention, access recertification across the repository, Adobe Admin Console, content source and CDN, and the audit evidence pack
- Support privacy, operational risks, control assessment and third-party risk processes with operational evidence and maintain alignment to regulatory expectations for technology, cyber and third-party risks.
- Keep the configuration management database, support model and assignment groups accurate as the platform estate grows.
WHAT DO YOU NEED TO SUCCEED?
- Substantial hands-on experience operating a high-traffic public website behind an enterprise content delivery network. Depth in CDN configuration – origin and cache behaviour, invalidation, edge logic, TLS and DNS – is the single most important qualification. Akamai and Cloudflare experience is an advantage.
- Practical web application firewall experience, including tuning false positives against production-like traffic before enforcement, and bot management that protects the site without blocking the crawlers you need.
- A real observability practice: defining service level objectives and error budgets, and building monitoring from log, real-user and synthetic sources rather than from an agent on a server
- Web performance engineering – Core Web Vitals, load and rendering behaviour, and the ability to read a waterfall and attribute a regression to a specific script.
- Comfortable with front-end technology: This platform ships JavaScript and CSS to the browser with no server tier; you cannot reason about its reliability without reading and understanding it
- Git-based release engineering and CI/CD as a production control, including infrastructure and configuration as code
- Incident command on customer facing services, and the discipline to produce evidence during an event, not after it.
- Working effectively in a regulated environment – change control, audit evidence, access management and third-party risk – without treating it as an obstacle.
Nice-to-have:
- Experience operating a vendor-run or SaaS-delivered platform, where reliability means instrumenting, escalating and holding a supplier accountable rather than fixing the tier yourself
- Adobe Experience Manager exposure, particularly Edge Delivery Services and Assets as a Cloud Service
- Financial services or another regulated sector
- Bilingual delivery – operating a site that must meet the same standard in English and French
- Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization literally sufficient to recognize when a reliability decision creates a compliance or discoverability problem
- Automation in Python, Java or JavaScript, and a preference for encoding a runbook rather than writing one.
