Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

Backblaze External Website

21h

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our services and infrastructure. This role focuses on building automation, maintaining observability, and supporting incident response to keep customer-facing systems performing at their best. The SRE will collaborate with engineering, product, and operations teams to embed reliability practices into day-to-day development and operations while contributing to tools and processes that improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
8+ years of progressive experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations.
Extensive experience designing, scaling, and operating large-scale, production-grade distributed systems.
Expert-level Linux systems administration and advanced troubleshooting skills.
Lead security-minded operations, focusing on system-wide patching, hardening, and proactive vulnerability identification.
Deep mastery of service reliability concepts, including advanced monitoring, complex alerting strategy, leading incident response, and in-depth root cause analysis.
Advanced proficiency in at least one modern scripting/programming language (Python or Go strongly preferred).
Expert knowledge of incident response methodologies and operational best practices.
Proven experience designing and operating container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts required.
Expert experience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform) in a production environment.

Nice To Haves

Significant experience in a SaaS, service provider, or hyper-scale distributed systems environment.
Deep familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and experience defining/enforcing SLO/SLA’s.
Exceptional problem-solving skills and a strong drive to learn and apply new, complex technologies.
Advanced experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) in a production setting.

Responsibilities

Own and drive the availability, durability, and performance of critical services across all production environments.
Lead and champion complex projects from problem discovery through complete, cross-functional resolution, demonstrating high-level technical ownership.
Define, establish, and enforce service health standards, including working with engineering leadership to implement SLIs, SLOs, and error budget policies for multiple services.
Lead critical incident response and post-incident reviews, translating findings into strategic, long-term service improvements and architectural changes.
Mentor others and act as a subject matter expert in following and evolving established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).
Design and architect scalable automation solutions to eliminate toil and improve the efficiency of operational tasks across the entire platform.
Drive the strategic direction of monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and integrate them for comprehensive observability.
Build, maintain, and secure advanced CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and complex infrastructure as code solutions (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
Write production-grade code (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to develop new reliability tools and enhance existing systems.
Act as a principal partner to engineering, product, and operations teams, consulting on resilient system design, architecture, and operation.
Lead and formalize the Production Readiness Review (PRR) process, ensuring robust operational handoff for all new services and features.
Lead capacity planning and disaster recovery strategy across critical infrastructure components.
Manage the relationship with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot systemic issues and ensure strict adherence to SLA performance.
Drive the creation of high-quality documentation, proactively share advanced learnings, and cultivate a reliability-first engineering culture across teams.
Own the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of operational playbooks, runbooks, and detailed system documentation.
Proactively identify systemic, recurring issues and architect and drive the implementation of long-term improvements and strategic design action plans.
Be a leading voice in promoting and embedding reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.

Benefits

Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
Competitive compensation and 401K
RSU grants for full-time employees
ESPP program
Flexible vacation policy
Maternity & paternity leave
MacBook Pro to use for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation
Childcare bonus (human children only)
Fertility treatment and support
Learning & development program
Commuter benefits
Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance