Software Architect, Reliability Engineering

Twilio

2h•Remote

About The Position

As an Architect in SRE, you will drive the technical strategy, vision and outcomes for Twilio’s Reliability Engineering organization. You will define and lead solutions and initiatives that ensure Twilio products are reliable worldwide, and you will define standards and guide engineering teams on best practices for designing, building, and operating resilient systems. This role is pivotal to Twilio’s commitment to operational excellence, scalability, and pragmatic, large-scale systems design in the cloud.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in Reliability Engineering, Software Engineering, DevOps roles with a focus on infrastructure, backend systems, and reliability, including as a principal/architect.
Strong experience in driving strategic technical decisions and defining long-term technical vision.
In-depth understanding of the role of Reliability Engineering in a large and diverse SaaS organization.
Experience driving cross-org technical architecture outcomes.
Knowledge of cloud architecture, devops practices, and large-scale systems design with microservices.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
Strong production experience, including operational management, scaling, partitioning strategies, and tuning for performance and reliability in high-scale environments.
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (e.g., EKS), deploying and managing stateful services, and cloud services like AWS.
Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation for automating infrastructure.
Expertise in observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) for monitoring distributed systems and setting up alerting.
Proficient in at least one programming language (e.g., Go, Python, Java) for building automation and tooling.
Experience designing incident response processes, SLOs/SLIs, runbooks, and participating in on-call rotations.
Experience running cross-functional post-incident reviews and driving improvements.
Strong understanding of distributed systems principles, including consensus, durability, throughput, and availability tradeoffs.
Proven track record of leading reliability improvements in data-intensive or mission-critical systems and collaborating with engineering teams.
Excellent problem-solving, analytical, verbal, and written communication skills, with the ability to work in cross-functional and distributed environments.
Demonstrated leadership in mentoring teams, influencing decisions, and balancing long-term objectives with short-term needs.
Ability to influence and build effective working relationships with all levels of the organization.

Nice To Haves

Specific experience owning and operating large AWS footprints.
Knowledge of Kubernetes architecture and concepts.
Experience with data technologies like Apache Kafka, AWS MSK, or similar for reliable streaming.
Passion for building reliable products, with prior projects in high-availability systems

Responsibilities

Partner with senior technical leaders across Twilio to set and communicate the reliability strategy, translating business goals into measurable outcomes.
Influence company-wide architectural decisions while balancing long-term vision with near-term and compliance needs.
Lead the design, implementation, and operation of scalable solutions and paved roads that enable reliable, high-traffic services;
Influence company-wide architectural decisions to focus on availability, performance, resilience, and cost efficiency using Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, and modern observability.
Ensure integrity and quality across the service lifecycle; design fault-tolerant architectures, incident response, disaster recovery, and capacity/cost management.
Collaborate with product and cross-functional teams to identify reliability risks and convert them into actionable designs, programs, and tooling.
Establish and champion reliability practices and drive systemic improvements.
Mentor and grow engineers and technical leaders
Track and apply emerging SRE, cloud, and large-scale systems best practices; introduce pragmatic innovations that improve reliability at scale.