Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Early Warning Services•Scottsdale, AZ

18h•$124,000 - $198,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Staff Site Reliability Engineer applies software engineering and systems engineering practices to improve the reliability, resilience, scalability, and operational health of production services. The role partners with Software Engineering and other technology teams to engineer reliability, observability, recoverability, performance, and operational readiness into systems throughout their lifecycle. It provides technical leadership across multiple services and teams, identifying cross-service risks and influencing engineering decisions beyond an individual application or team. At the Staff level, the role drives reliability engineering across teams by identifying cross-service patterns and risks, developing reusable solutions, and multiplying engineering capability. Staff SREs operate across complex cross-team reliability problems, drive technical decisions without formal authority, and create reusable approaches with impact beyond an individual service. They share knowledge and build sustainable engineering capability rather than creating dependency on individual expertise. The position follows a hybrid work model. Candidates must independently be eligible to work in the United States for any employer by the date of hire; employment visa sponsorship is not available. Work is performed in a normal office environment and is primarily sedentary, with extensive computer use. The stated annual base pay range is $124,000–$165,000 in Phoenix, Arizona and Chicago, Illinois, and $149,000–$198,000 in San Francisco, California. Candidates are also eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits.

Requirements

Typically 8 or more years of relevant professional experience in Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Systems Engineering, Cloud/Platform Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure Engineering, Architecture where applicable, or a comparable technical discipline.
Experience with software development or scripting using Python, SQL, Shell, Java, or Spring Boot.
Experience with software engineering principles, distributed systems, production troubleshooting, automation, and observability appropriate to the level.
Experience with public cloud technologies and architectures, preferably AWS, as well as infrastructure, networking, Linux/Unix, and modern application architectures appropriate to the level.
Experience with observability technologies such as Splunk, AppDynamics, OpenTelemetry, Honeycomb, and Grafana.
Proficiency in Linux and Cloudera Manager.
Experience monitoring and optimizing performance in clustered environments, including HBase, Kafka, Solr, and Cloudera-managed Hadoop clusters.
Analytical, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills appropriate to the scope of the role.
Must independently possess eligibility to work in the United States for any employer at the date of hire; this position is ineligible for employment visa sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on AWS experience, or comparable experience with another major cloud platform such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Experience developing, deploying, operating, or improving highly available production software or distributed systems.
Experience with CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containers or orchestration, observability, monitoring, alerting, and software-delivery automation.
Experience with SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, incident management, performance analysis, capacity management, resilience testing, disaster recovery, or operational readiness appropriate to the level.
Experience creating reusable automation, tooling, platforms, patterns, or practices that improve engineering effectiveness.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

Use software engineering, automation, and DevOps principles to continually improve how services are built, tested, deployed, observed, operated, and recovered.
Use data, evidence, experimentation, and rigorous engineering analysis to identify reliability risks, test assumptions, and guide technical decisions.
Define, implement, or improve SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and other service-health measures appropriate to the scope of responsibility.
Improve observability through metrics, logging, tracing, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and service-health instrumentation.
Drive continuous improvement across CI/CD, observability, deployment practices, Infrastructure as Code, automation, testing, incident response, capacity management, resilience, and operational readiness.
Identify recurring or systemic production issues and translate operational experience into improvements in code, architecture, automation, tooling, and engineering practices.
Partner with Software Engineering teams to incorporate reliability, resiliency, scalability, performance, observability, recoverability, and operational readiness throughout the development lifecycle.
Participate in or lead incident response, troubleshooting, service restoration, and blameless post-incident learning.
Provide technical leadership and escalation support for significant or complex production incidents, and improve on-call effectiveness and sustainability across services and teams.
Reduce operational toil and unnecessary manual intervention through software, automation, reusable patterns, and improved engineering practices.
Multiply engineering capability across teams through reusable patterns, tooling, automation, technical guidance, mentoring, and knowledge transfer.
Drive technical decisions across complex, cross-team reliability problems without formal authority and develop reusable approaches with impact beyond an individual service.

Benefits

Competitive medical coverage, including PPO and HDHP plans.
Dental insurance.
Vision insurance.
Company contributions to a Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax flexible spending accounts for commuting, health, and dependent care expenses.
401(k) retirement plan with a 100% company Safe Harbor match on the first 6% deferred, immediately upon eligibility.
Flexible Time Off for exempt employees and generous PTO for non-exempt employees.
11 paid company holidays.
Paid volunteer day.
12 weeks of paid parental leave.
Maven Family Planning support, including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.
Discretionary incentive plan.