Staff Site Reliability Engineer
About The Position
Ethos is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to provide technical leadership for its US SRE organization. The role helps set the direction for building, operating, and scaling production systems, including AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure and internal platforms and toolchains supporting AI initiatives. This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor position with organization-wide scope, involving direct infrastructure development, cross-team initiatives, and close partnership with product engineering teams to improve reliability. The engineer will work with SRE leadership in the US and Bangalore on the roadmap and serve as a technical authority on reliability, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency. The role spans technical strategy and architecture, reliability and performance engineering, infrastructure and AI platform tooling, security and compliance, cloud and AI cost management, and developer productivity. The engineer will define reliability practices and standards, lead incident response and resilience work, build governed AI gateways and secure infrastructure, optimize cloud and model usage costs, and develop tools and self-service platforms that improve engineering productivity.
Requirements
- 10+ years of full-time software engineering experience in relevant roles such as SRE, Infrastructure, Platform, DevOps, or Backend SWE, including significant experience operating production systems at scale.
- Track record of leading complex, multi-team infrastructure or reliability initiatives from ambiguity to delivery and influencing technical direction beyond the immediate team.
- Strong coding skills in Golang, Python, or TypeScript and commitment to engineering best practices, including design patterns, code reviews, and testing.
- Deep, hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, PostgreSQL, CI/CD systems, and observability tooling such as DataDog.
- Hands-on experience implementing SLIs and SLOs, leading incident response, and running effective post-mortems.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including ability to write design documents, explain trade-offs to executives, and build consensus across teams.
- A strong desire to remove toil from systems and judgment to balance reliability, velocity, and cost.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building Kubernetes operators.
- Experience building or operating LLM toolchains, such as AI gateways, model routing (e.g., Bedrock or Anthropic), and governance frameworks including PII scanning and audit trails for model interactions.
- Demonstrated experience leading cloud cost optimization or building usage metering systems.
- Experience in regulated industries such as insurance, fintech, or healthcare, or with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2.
- Experience collaborating with globally distributed teams.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive multi-quarter technical strategy for reliability, infrastructure, and platform tooling in partnership with SRE and engineering leadership and aligned with company OKRs.
- Lead the design of complex, cross-cutting infrastructure systems and author and review technical specifications and architecture proposals.
- Influence product engineering teams to adopt reliability best practices and advise on production readiness for new services.
- Mentor SREs across the US and Bangalore through design reviews, pairing, and code review, and participate in interviews.
- Establish frameworks for defining, measuring, and acting on SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and help teams instrument and monitor them.
- Serve as a senior technical leader during high-severity incidents, promote blameless post-mortems, and ensure follow-up work reduces recurrence.
- Lead capacity planning, disaster recovery, and failure-mode testing.
- Evolve monitoring and alerting strategies to detect failures early and support sustainable on-call practices.
- Design, build, and operate AWS infrastructure using Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitOps workflows including ArgoCD and Atlantis.
- Architect and build governed AI model-routing gateways with access controls, audit trails, and secure data connectors such as MCP.
- Ensure infrastructure, including AI prototyping environments, meets security and regulatory requirements through automated scanning, PII guardrails, and scoped data access.
- Lead cloud cost optimization initiatives, including right-sizing, spot instance utilization, and cost attribution.
- Design metering and budgeting for LLM token usage and cost-aware routing to select efficient models.
- Establish cost metrics and partner with engineering teams on performant, cost-effective architectures.
- Build internal tools, CI/CD pipelines, and self-service platforms that make reliable practices easy for product engineering teams to adopt.
- Identify systemic sources of toil across engineering and automate them away.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
