Site Reliability Engineer

Location: Khobar, Saudi Arabia Thales people architect identity management and data protection solutions at the heart of digital security. Business and governments rely on us to bring trust to the billions of digital interactions they have with people. Our technologies and services help banks exchange funds, people cross borders, energy become smarter and much more. More than 30,000 organizations already rely on us to verify the identities of people and things, grant access to digital services, analyze vast quantities of information and encrypt data to make the connected world more secure. For over 50 years, Thales has been a trusted partner of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As a local industrial partner, Thales provides advanced solutions in Defence, Public Security, Civil Aviation, Space, Enterprise, and Cybersecurity across four sites throughout the country. The Saudi Vision 2030 is at the heart of Thales' strategy in the Kingdom, driving the localisation of defence technologies and systems, strengthening local capabilities, developing local talent, and supporting national sovereignty through strategic collaborations. To reinforce its commitment to localising its defence activities and to build a future we can trust in the Kingdom, Thales established SAMI Thales Electronic Systems (STES), a Joint Venture with Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI), operating under the ambitious directives outlined in Vision 2030. We are seeking a skilled DevSecOps / Sovereign Cloud Engineer with 5-10 years of experience to design, operate, and secure regulated cloud environments across AWS and GCP. The role combines cloud operations, security engineering, and SRE practices, including Kubernetes management, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD automation (Git/GitLab), and secrets management (HashiCorp Vault). The ideal candidate will drive security incident response, platform reliability, observability (Datadog), and 24x7 incident management while embedding security-by-design principles, automation-first practices, and continuous improvement into sovereign cloud platforms. Strong expertise in cloud security, networking fundamentals, compliance-driven environments, and cross-functional incident leadership is essential.

A week in the life of an DevSecOps Engineer:

• Deploy, manage and maintain the organization’s Sovereign Cloud strategy, ensuring compliance with regulatory and data residency requirements on AWS/GCP public cloud.
• Managing and operating Kubernetes clusters including upgrades, scaling, and workload optimization.
• Security Incident Response & Risk Mitigation – Investigate, analyze, and remediate cloud security incidents, proactively identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities within AWS environments.
• Secure Cloud Strategy & Continuous Improvement – Support and enhance the organization’s AWS cloud strategy by embedding security best practices and continuously improving the cloud security posture.
• Security Automation & DevSecOps Enablement – Implement and tune security tools, automate policy-driven responses, and advocate DevSecOps practices to ensure secure-by-design cloud operations.
• Implementing and managing Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) to provision, modify, and secure cloud resources.
• Maintaining and optimizing CI/CD pipelines using Git/GitLab, ensuring secure and automated deployments.
• Managing secrets and secure access using HashiCorp Vault, including token lifecycle, access policies, and secrets rotation.
• Troubleshooting complex infrastructure, networking, container, and performance issues across distributed systems.
• Observability & Reliability Engineering – Monitor system health and performance using Datadog, define and manage SLIs/SLOs, and drive continuous reliability improvements aligned with SRE principles.
• Incident Management & Operational Governance – Manage 24x7 alerting and incident response through PagerDuty, perform root cause analysis (RCA), and actively contribute to incident, problem, and change management processes.
• Cloud Security & Performance Optimization – Conduct proactive system hardening, vulnerability remediation, performance tuning, and capacity planning across cloud environments.
• Automation & Continuous Improvement – Develop automation using Python/Bash/Terraform/Ansible to reduce manual effort, improve operational efficiency, and strengthen platform resilience.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience: To succeed in this role, you must have:

• 4–5 years of hands-on experience in DevSecOps, SRE roles.
• Proven hands-on expertise managing Kubernetes clusters
• Experience with Terraform (IaC) Deployment, Git/Gitlab for CI/CD and version control for best practices
• Experience working with HashiCorp Vault, Terraform, Datadog, Pagerduty, Confluence etc
• Strong understanding of Cloud Security principles (IAM, encryption, network security, container security, vulnerability management).
• Experience in incident management, change management, and root cause analysis processes.
• SRE & Automation Expertise – Strong understanding of SRE principles (SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, reliability metrics) with hands-on scripting experience in Python and/or Bash to drive automation-first practices.
• Networking & Compliance Knowledge – Solid grasp of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, firewalls, VPNs, private endpoints) with experience or exposure to regulated and compliance-driven environments.
• Leads incident bridges during P1/P2 outages, coordinating cross-functional teams and driving timely resolution with clear RCA.
• Maintains a strong customer and business-focused mindset while prioritizing tasks.
• Cloud certifications in a plus
• Linux, Kubernets, Terraform, Ansible, Google Cloud knowledge is mandatory. At Thales we provide CAREERS and not only jobs. With Thales employing 80,000 employees in 68 countries our mobility policy enables thousands of employees each year to develop their careers at home and abroad, in their existing areas of expertise or by branching out into new fields. Together we believe that embracing flexibility is a smarter way of working. Great journeys start here, apply now!