Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Novellia

29d•$150,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Novellia is a Series A health tech startup, and we're hiring our first Site Reliability Engineer. You'll join Platform Engineering as its second member, working directly with the Head of Platform Engineering to establish the reliability foundations the company will build on for years. As the 'First SRE', most interesting problems are still unsolved. There is no runbook to inherit. You'll help decide what we monitor, how we deploy, what "reliable enough" means for a product handling health data, and how engineering teams interact with production. Your fingerprints will be on all of it. We believe reliability is a problem-solving discipline, not a tooling discipline. Sometimes the right fix is code or infrastructure. Just as often it's a better process: a clearer escalation path, a lighter-weight change review, an on-call rotation that doesn't burn people out, or a conversation that gets two teams aligned on an SLO. We're looking for someone who reaches for whichever solution actually fits the problem, and who enjoys working with stakeholders to figure out what the problem really is before solving it.

Requirements

5+ years in SRE, platform, DevOps, or backend roles with meaningful production ownership: you've carried a pager, owned services through real incidents, and made systems measurably better afterward.
Comfortable in at least one general-purpose language (Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar), and willing to go into application code and change it when that's where the fix lives. This isn't about cleaning up someone else's work; it's about having skin in the game and being ready to lean in when a problem calls for it.
A track record of solving problems, not just closing tickets. You can walk us through real problems you identified, how you decided what to do, and what changed as a result.
Evidence you treat process as a legitimate engineering tool: you've improved a review workflow, restructured an on-call, introduced a postmortem practice, or otherwise fixed something by changing how people work.
Strong collaboration instincts: you seek out the people affected by a problem, listen well, write clearly, and bring stakeholders along rather than presenting them with a finished decision.
Self-directed and used to operating without a playbook. You'll get problems and a close working partner, not a queue of tasks, and you're comfortable setting direction others will build on.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a regulated environment (healthcare, fintech) or working with HIPAA, SOC 2, or similar frameworks.
You've been an early or first infrastructure/reliability hire and know what greenfield ownership actually feels like day to day.
Experience introducing reliability practices to teams that didn't have them.

Responsibilities

Design the human side of reliability: on-call rotations, incident roles and communication, blameless postmortems, and change management that adds safety without adding drag.
Help shape the platform roadmap: bring us the problems you're seeing, propose solutions, and own them through to adoption.
Build and operate the core reliability toolkit: observability (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting), CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and incident response.
Embed with product engineers to make services more operable, and to raise the operational literacy of the whole team rather than becoming its single point of failure.
Define our first SLOs in partnership with product and engineering stakeholders, grounded in what actually matters to patients and customers rather than what's easy to measure.
Investigate incidents and recurring pain end to end, and be equally willing to conclude "this needs a process change" as "this needs a code change."
Contribute to the compliance and security posture that health data demands (audit trails, access controls, environment isolation), working alongside the Head of Platform Engineering. Reliability here is also about patient trust: people share their health history with us because we're transparent about how it's handled, and the systems you keep running are what make that promise real.