Sr Site Reliability Engineer
About The Position
The Senior Site Reliability Engineer is a Technical Duty Officer (TDO) in PayPal’s Command Center team, serving as an incident commander during critical incidents. The role directs application and infrastructure teams, assigns work, prioritizes troubleshooting, and authorizes critical actions such as rollbacks and regional failovers. It requires technical depth to review Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes manifests, and CI/CD configurations and make informed decisions under pressure. The Command Center team is the operational and technical authority during PayPal’s most critical incidents. It directs cross-functional engineering efforts across PayPal’s core platforms and brands, including Venmo, Xoom, Zettle, and Braintree. The role owns system performance and reliability, leads complex incident response, builds operational automation, improves monitoring and observability, plans capacity, and helps ensure disaster recovery readiness. It also partners with engineering and product teams on reliable, scalable architecture and provides technical guidance to junior engineers.
Requirements
- At least 3 years of relevant experience and a bachelor’s degree, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
- At least 5 years of experience in site reliability engineering, infrastructure operations, or similar technical operations roles.
- Significant hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider; AWS or GCP is required.
- Professional-level certification in a major cloud platform, such as AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, or equivalent.
- Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi, including reading, reviewing, and troubleshooting configurations during incidents.
- Significant hands-on experience with Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem tools, including troubleshooting deployments, manifests, and cluster issues.
- Ability to quickly read and review code in languages such as Python, Go, and Bash, as well as YAML, HCL, and JSON configuration formats.
- Experience managing critical incidents in Infrastructure-as-Code-driven environments, including IaC state issues, GitOps failures, and cloud-native deployment problems.
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana.
- Strong knowledge of networking, load balancing, CDN technologies, and DNS management.
- Proficiency in scripting for operational automation, including Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
- Proficiency in infrastructure automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and containerization, including Docker and Kubernetes.
Nice To Haves
- Multi-cloud experience.
- Experience with cloud platforms including AWS, GCP, and/or Azure.
Responsibilities
- Take ownership of system performance monitoring, identify inefficiencies, and lead initiatives to improve platform and application availability and reliability.
- Lead responses to complex, high-priority incidents, ensure prompt resolution, and conduct thorough root cause analysis to prevent recurrence.
- Direct application and infrastructure teams during incidents, assign work, prioritize troubleshooting paths, and authorize critical actions such as rollbacks and regional failovers.
- Design and implement automation frameworks to improve operational efficiency, streamline processes, and reduce human error.
- Lead reliability initiatives to ensure systems are highly available, resilient, and scalable, and promote best practices across engineering teams.
- Improve monitoring and observability by identifying key metrics, optimizing alerting, and enhancing monitoring infrastructure.
- Forecast resource requirements and lead capacity planning to support growing user demand.
- Maintain robust disaster recovery strategies and conduct regular recovery testing.
- Partner with engineering and product teams to improve system architecture, scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance.
- Mentor junior site reliability engineers and foster skill development and knowledge sharing.
- Drive continuous improvement in operational workflows, including optimization, cost reduction, and performance enhancement.
Benefits
- Generous paid time off.
- Healthcare coverage for employees and their families.
- Resources to support financial security and mental health.
- An annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation may be available, as applicable.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
