Software Engineer III, Reliability

Box•Redwood City, CA

About The Position

The Reliability Engineering team at Box ensures our platform delivers world-class performance, scalability, and reliability as we continue to serve millions of users worldwide. As our business grows, so does the complexity of operating distributed systems at scale. Our mission is to proactively identify and solve the hardest reliability and performance challenges across Box’s infrastructure, working closely with product and platform teams to build resilient, scalable, and highly performant services. As a Software Engineer III (SWE 3) on the Reliability Engineering team, you’ll have a direct impact on the performance and scalability of our most critical services. You’ll partner with engineering teams across the company to analyze complex system behaviors under load, design scalable solutions, and build testing frameworks that validate service reliability before issues arise in production. This role provides a unique opportunity to work broadly across our technical stack and make meaningful contributions to Box’s long-term scalability and customer experience.

Requirements

3+ years of experience in software engineering, performance engineering, or site reliability engineering, with a focus on backend systems and scalability.
Proficient in one or more programming languages such as Go or Java, with an emphasis on building performant services.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, resource contention, and efficient system design.
Hands-on experience analyzing and improving application and system performance across compute, storage, database, and networking layers.
Familiarity with load testing and performance benchmarking tools (e.g., Locust, JMeter, Gatling, or custom frameworks).
Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
Proficient with observability tools and telemetry systems (e.g., Prometheus, Chronosphere, Grafana, Datadog, ELK).
Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with a data-driven approach to diagnosing complex system behaviors.
Strong collaboration and communication skills; comfortable partnering across engineering teams to drive reliability improvements.

Nice To Haves

Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Envoy) and cloud-native networking performance optimization.
Exposure to capacity planning, cost optimization, and long-term resource forecasting in cloud environments.
Familiarity with incident response processes, post-incident reviews, and reliability improvement practices.
Experience contributing to internal platforms, developer tooling, or performance automation frameworks.

Responsibilities

Partner with product and platform engineering teams to assess service designs for scalability and performance risks, ensuring systems are built for long-term growth.
Analyze production workloads, system metrics, and load test results to identify bottlenecks, resource inefficiencies, and architectural scaling limits.
Design and build frameworks for load testing, capacity modeling, and performance validation that enable teams to proactively address scale concerns.
Drive improvements in backend service efficiency, API response times, and resource utilization across Box’s globally distributed platform.
Collaborate with SRE, infrastructure, and platform teams to optimize scaling strategies, auto-scaling policies, and resource allocation.
Build automation and tooling that integrate performance validation into CI/CD pipelines, enabling early detection of regressions.
Participate in root cause analysis of performance-related incidents, identify systemic issues, and drive cross-team remediation efforts.
Contribute to the evolution of observability standards (SLIs, SLOs, latency/error budgets) that measure and guide service health.