Senior Site Reliability Engineer I

Axon•Seattle, WA

16h•Hybrid

About The Position

Join Axon and be a Force for Good. At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other. Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that that matters at a company where you matter. Your Impact Are you an engineer who gets excited about the challenge of making complex distributed systems observable — not just instrumenting them, but designing the infrastructure that makes traces, metrics, and logs useful at scale? In this role, you will help build and evolve Axon's next-generation observability platform, enabling the entire engineering organization to understand and operate their services with confidence. You'll work across the full observability stack: from distributed tracing adoption (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) to log infrastructure (Loki, Alloy) to metrics (Cortex, Prometheus, Grafana). You'll partner directly with Axon's engineering teams to drive adoption of modern observability practices and build the tooling that makes our platform self-service for the teams that depend on it. You will be part of the Observability team within Axon's Site Reliability organization — a focused team responsible for Axon's metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting infrastructure across dozens of environments globally. The ideal candidate has a strong infrastructure engineering background, is comfortable working across cloud-native systems, and cares about both the technical depth and the developer experience of observability. You'll thrive here if you have opinions about what good observability looks like, and enjoy the challenge of making it real in a large, fast-moving organization.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an equivalent highly technical field
7+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering
Strong Linux systems fundamentals and comfort working in Kubernetes-based environments
Hands-on experience with one or more components of the LGTM stack: Loki, Grafana, Tempo/Jaeger, or Mimir/Cortex
Experience with infrastructure as code — Terraform strongly preferred, CDK is a plus
Experience with any of: Golang, Python, or Java
United States citizen — able to gain CJIS clearance for full US production access

Nice To Haves

Experience deploying and operating distributed tracing systems (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Tempo, or similar)
Familiarity with OpenTelemetry — instrumentation, collectors, and pipelines
Experience with GitOps workflows
Exposure to 24/7 high-volume systems with formal SLA requirements
Experience with agentic AI tooling or building LLM-powered developer tools
Ability to debug complex multi-service distributed systems

Responsibilities

Own and evolve Axon's distributed tracing infrastructure, including Jaeger and OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation, driving adoption across Axon's service-oriented architecture
Build and operate Axon's log aggregation platform (Grafana Loki + Alloy), expanding use cases beyond Kubernetes event logs and reducing organizational dependency on expensive third-party log tooling (including Splunk)
Maintain and improve Axon's metrics infrastructure (Cortex, Prometheus, Grafana) — the foundation for alerting, dashboards, and SLO tracking across all of Axon's environments
Write internal tooling and automation that makes observability self-service: toolkit commands, agentic on-call helpers, runbook generation, and dashboard scaffolding
Manage observability infrastructure as code via Terraform, CDK, ArgoCD, and Helm — including capacity management, cybersecurity requirements and compliance, and on-call rotation participation
Work directly with engineering teams across Axon to define instrumentation standards, drive tracing adoption, and help teams build meaningful SLOs for their services