Site Reliability Engineer

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Location: Seattle, hybrid - 2 times a week in the office

Job Type: Full-time, direct hire

Industry: High-Growth Technology / SaaS

About the Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Site Reliability Engineer to drive the reliability, scalability, and performance of our client's production systems. The ideal candidate combines deep software engineering ability with system-level expertise, applying core SRE principles to reduce toil, minimize downtime, and build self-healing infrastructure across complex, high-scale environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Reliability Engineering: Define and drive adoption of SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets across services, using them to guide engineering priorities and release decisions.
• Automation & Toil Reduction: Build tools and automation (Python, Go, Bash) to eliminate manual operational work and enable self-service capabilities for engineering teams.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Design and maintain scalable, resilient infrastructure on AWS using Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi, ensuring consistency and repeatability.
• Observability: Architect monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, OpenTelemetry) that give clear, actionable signals into system health.
• Incident Management: Act as an incident commander during major outages, lead blameless postmortems, and drive systemic fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Capacity Planning & Performance: Forecast growth, execute load/chaos testing, and tune systems proactively to stay ahead of scaling bottlenecks.
• CI/CD & Deployment Safety: Partner with engineering teams to build safe, progressive delivery pipelines (canary, blue/green, feature flags) using tools like ArgoCD, Jenkins, or GitLab CI.
• Security & Compliance: Embed security best practices into infrastructure and deployment pipelines, including access control, network segmentation, and vulnerability management.
• On-Call Leadership: Participate in and help evolve on-call rotations, escalation policies, and runbooks to reduce alert fatigue and improve response times.
• Mentorship & Culture: Champion SRE best practices across the organization, mentor engineers on reliability thinking, and influence upstream architecture decisions.

Qualifications & Experience

• 6+ years of hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Backend/Systems Engineering with a track record of owning production reliability at scale.
• Strong Software Engineering Background: Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar languages—focused on building maintainable services and tooling, not just basic scripting.
• AWS Expertise: Deep technical knowledge of AWS core services (EC2, Lambda, RDS, VPC, IAM, S3, Terraform/CloudFormation) alongside cost and performance optimization.
• Linux Systems Mastery: Demonstrated proficiency in performance tuning, kernel/network troubleshooting, and security hardening.
• Container Orchestration: Hands-on experience operating Kubernetes/EKS in production environments at scale.
• SRE Frameworks: Proven experience defining and operationalizing SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Distributed Systems: Strong understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, failover strategies, and graceful degradation.
• Observability & Incident Command: Experience building full-stack observability pipelines and leading major incident response efforts.

Nice to Have

• Experience with multi-cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Chaos engineering experience (Gremlin, Chaos Mesh, or custom fault-injection tooling).
• Active AWS Certifications (DevOps Engineer Professional, Solutions Architect).
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA).
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd).
• Background in internal platform/developer experience (DevEx) teams.