Site Reliability Engineer
About The Position
This is a rare opportunity to be a founding SRE at Underdog, helping define how reliability, scalability, and operational excellence work as the company continues to grow. You’ll operate in exploration mode early on, identifying the highest-leverage reliability challenges and shaping our approach to incident response, observability, and SLOs. This is a high-impact role with real ownership from day one, partnering closely with platform, infrastructure, and product teams to ensure Underdog scales through peak traffic, game-day spikes, and rapid iteration while improving both system reliability and developer experience.
Requirements
- A strong written and verbal communicator
- Collaborative by nature
- Someone who enjoys using research, data, and experiments to make decisions; you believe “Hope is not a strategy.”
- You enjoy working directly with customers (generally engineers or other people inside the company)
- You think long-term about what is best for the business and its customers
- You are excited to take ownership
- You are very comfortable around an IDE, working with multiple languages, multiple web application frameworks, AWS services, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL
- You can work independently to learn new languages/technologies as needed
- You enjoy deploying changes to production quickly, multiple times a week if necessary
Nice To Haves
- Experience with PostgreSQL SQL query optimization, tweaking autovacuum settings, table statistics, different index types, etc.
- Experience with Redis / Valkey Optimization
- Experience with Datadog or similar observability tools
- Experience working as a web application developer, frontend or backend, especially in React and Ruby on Rails
- Experience with AWS cost optimization
- Read the Google SRE books or similar books, or have other forms of SRE training
- Actively leveraging the capabilities of AI to augment abilities and gain knowledge about interested domains
Responsibilities
- Own and maintain the incident response process, including defining procedures, tools, and best practices
- Guide teams in establishing and monitoring Service Level Objectives (SLOs), including setting up alerts and reporting systems
- Lead capacity planning initiatives, focusing on both short and long-term scalability while optimizing costs
- Develop and implement disaster recovery plans, including regular testing and regulatory compliance
- Collaborate with teams on architecture decisions to ensure high availability and scalability
- Manage launch and event planning for high-traffic occasions, focusing on infrastructure preparation and capacity management (a.k.a. Launch Readiness)
- Act as an internal expert and consultant for monitoring tools like Datadog and Pagerduty and infrastructure like AWS and Kubernetes
- Emphasis on automation and tooling to scale our workload
- Contribute across codebases in Ruby, Python, Go, TypeScript, Swift, and Kotlin as needed to support the initiatives described above.
Benefits
- Unlimited PTO (we're extremely flexible with the exception of the first few weeks before & into the NFL season)
- 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
- Home office stipend
- A connected virtual first culture with a highly engaged distributed workforce
- 5% 401k match, FSA, company paid health, dental, vision plan options for employees and dependents
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
251-500 employees
