Sr. Staff SRE

Lytx, Inc.•San Diego, CA

2d•$207,000 - $261,000

About The Position

Why Lytx: At Lytx, our engineering culture is built around being hungry, low-ego, and highly capable. We are pragmatic engineers who take ownership, collaborate openly, and focus on delivering measurable operational impact. Our mission is to design, operate, and continuously evolve the cloud infrastructure and operational platforms that power mission-critical SaaS and IoT services at global scale. We are growing rapidly and expanding the use of AI across our platform and engineering operations. As our systems scale in complexity and business criticality, we are investing in next-generation observability, intelligent automation, and AIOps capabilities to enable proactive, insight-driven operations. The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization is responsible for the availability, reliability, observability, and resilience of our cloud-native environments. This includes building the operational platforms, telemetry strategy, and automation frameworks that allow engineering teams to operate confidently and efficiently. This role sits at the center of operational intelligence for the company. As a Sr. Staff SRE, you will define the technical vision for observability and operational automation, influence architecture across the organization, and lead initiatives that reduce operational risk, improve system insight, and enable predictive, automated response at scale. If you enjoy building foundational platforms, shaping engineering standards, and driving the evolution toward AI-enabled operations, this role provides an opportunity to have broad organizational impact.

Requirements

8–10+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure roles supporting large-scale production environments.
Demonstrated experience leading architecture, reliability strategy, or operational platforms across multiple teams or organizational domains.
Proven track record operating in 24/7 production environments, including incident leadership, postmortem practices, and proactive reliability management.
Cloud & Architecture Deep expertise designing and operating large-scale AWS environments, including services such as VPC, EC2, EKS/ECS, RDS/DynamoDB, S3, ALB/NLB, IAM, KMS, Route 53, and multi-account architectures.
Experience designing resilient, fault-tolerant systems using multi-AZ/multi-region patterns, graceful degradation, rate limiting, and capacity management.
Observability & Operational Intelligence Senior-level experience with observability platforms (metrics, logs, traces, events) such as New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar.
Experience defining telemetry standards, instrumentation strategies, centralized dashboards, and low-noise alerting practices.
Experience improving operational signal quality through correlation, noise reduction, or advanced analytics.
Automation & Infrastructure as Code Expert-level experience with Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform and/or CloudFormation, including reusable modules, GitOps workflows, and policy-as-code guardrails.
Strong scripting or programming skills (Python, Go, Bash, or similar) for automation and operational tooling.
Systems & Platform Expertise Expert understanding of Linux systems, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS), and distributed system behavior.
Expert with Kubernetes and cloud-native architecture patterns.
Leadership & Impact Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction without direct authority.
Experience mentoring senior engineers and setting organization-wide engineering standards.
Ability to operate effectively in complex, high-impact environments and drive initiatives from concept through adoption.

Nice To Haves

AIOps / Intelligent Automation (Preferred) Experience implementing or evaluating AIOps capabilities such as anomaly detection, event correlation, predictive alerting, automated remediation, or AI-assisted incident analysis.
Familiarity with applying machine learning or AI techniques to operational data, incident trends, or reliability workflows.

Responsibilities

Strategic Technical Leadership: Define and drive the long-term strategy for observability, operational intelligence, and reliability engineering across the organization, aligning technical direction with business growth, customer experience, and service-level objectives.
Operational Intelligence & AIOps: Lead the evolution toward intelligent operations by designing capabilities such as event correlation, anomaly detection, alert noise reduction, predictive signal detection, and automated remediation to improve MTTD, MTTR, and operational efficiency.
Observability Platform Architecture: Architect and lead the end-to-end observability platform across metrics, logs, traces, and events. Establish scalable telemetry standards, instrumentation patterns, and onboarding models that enable consistent visibility across AWS and cloud-native services.
Automation at Scale: Drive large-scale automation initiatives that reduce operational toil, including self-service infrastructure workflows, policy-as-code guardrails, reliability automation, and automated response for common failure scenarios.
Reliability & Resilience Engineering: Partner with product, platform, and data teams to embed reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and fault tolerance into system design. Lead capacity modeling, resilience planning, and architecture improvements for multi-AZ and multi-region environments.
Incident Leadership & Continuous Learning: Provide technical leadership during high-severity incidents and guide blameless postmortems that identify systemic issues and drive long-term reliability improvements.
Organizational Standards & Governance: Define and standardize SLO/SLI frameworks, error budget practices, telemetry conventions, and infrastructure patterns to ensure consistent operational excellence across teams.
Innovation & Technology Evaluation: Evaluate and introduce emerging AWS-native, cloud-native, and AI-enabled observability and automation technologies. Lead proofs-of-concept and guide organization-wide adoption.
Mentorship & Influence: Mentor Staff and Senior SREs, raising the bar for system design, operational rigor, and engineering judgment while fostering a culture of ownership, learning, and continuous improvement.
Cross-Organizational Influence: Act as a senior technical authority for reliability and observability, shaping engineering roadmaps and influencing architectural decisions across product and platform domains.