Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Early Warning® • Scottsdale, AZ

1d • $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.

This role provides technical leadership across multiple services and engineering teams, identifying cross-service risks and influencing engineering decisions beyond an individual application or team. Staff SREs develop reusable solutions and patterns, multiply engineering capability across teams, and drive reliability engineering across the organization without formal authority.

Early Warning follows a hybrid work model. Candidates must independently be eligible to work in the United States for any employer at the date of hire; employment visa sponsorship is not available. The position is based in Phoenix, Arizona; Chicago, Illinois; or San Francisco, California. The listed annual base pay is $124,000–$165,000 in Phoenix or Chicago and $149,000–$198,000 in San Francisco. 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 role.
• Experience with public cloud technologies and architectures, preferably AWS, as well as infrastructure, networking, Linux/Unix, and modern application architectures.
• Demonstrated analytical, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills appropriate to the scope of the role.
• 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.
• Ability to distinguish observed facts from assumptions and make defensible engineering recommendations.
• Ability to share knowledge and build sustainable engineering capability across teams.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience with AWS, 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.
• 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 practices to 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.
• Improve observability using 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.
• Develop reusable engineering patterns, tooling, and automation; provide technical guidance, mentoring, and knowledge transfer across teams.
• Drive technical decisions and address complex cross-team reliability problems without formal authority.

Benefits

• Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans.
• Company contributions to a Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax flexible spending accounts (FSA) 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 or generous PTO for non-exempt employees.
• 11 paid company holidays and a 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed