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 Dev Sec Ops  / 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/Git Lab), and secrets management (Hashi Corp 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.

• 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 & Dev Sec Ops  Enablement – Implement and tune security tools, automate policy-driven responses, and advocate Dev Sec Ops  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/Git Lab, ensuring secure and automated deployments.
• Managing secrets and secure access using Hashi Corp 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 Pager Duty, 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…