Staff Software Engineer, Reliability

Metropolis•Seattle, WA

1d•$203,500 - $248,500•Onsite

About The Position

Metropolis is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on Reliability to own reliability across the entire Metropolis platform and drive the comprehensive practices that ensure system availability, resilience, and observability for our mission-critical mobility infrastructure. In this role, you will build reliability from first principles, architecting failover systems, implementing chaos engineering, and improving our observability foundation to maintain 99.9%+ uptime as we scale to new markets. As the technical owner of our reliability posture, you will tackle challenges like external service failover, dependency mirroring, and database replication, working alongside highly technical teams across the organization to influence architecture decisions and establish company-wide reliability standards. You will join the Product Foundations team, playing a key role in building the foundational infrastructure that powers the future of mobility commerce.

Requirements

8+ years of engineering experience including software engineering, reliability engineering, SRE practices, or production operations at scale
Demonstrate expert-level reliability engineering skills including hands-on experience with multi-region architectures, failover automation, circuit breakers, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery
Utilize production observability expertise with deep experience implementing monitoring, alerting, tracing, and logging systems at scale – specifically Datadog or similar APM platforms in high-load environments
Apply strong systems thinking with proven ability to design resilient distributed systems that gracefully handle failures, network partitions, and external dependency outages
Demonstrate database and data systems knowledge including replication strategies, backup/restore procedures, connection pooling, query optimization, and experience with both relational and NoSQL databases
Leverage cloud platform expertise with production experience operating and ensuring reliability of systems on AWS including multi-region deployments, load balancing, and DNS-based failover
Possess experience with AI-powered development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar agentic coding tools for enhanced productivity – context engineering in particular
Exhibit excellent technical communication with ability to influence technical decisions across teams, document complex systems, conduct post-mortems, and establish reliability standards organization-wide
Demonstrate expert-level Java and/or Scala proficiency with strong understanding of JVM performance, concurrency, and operational characteristics

Nice To Haves

Bring Scala experience
Possess SRE or Reliability Engineering experience at companies known for operational excellence such as Google, Amazon, Netflix or high-growth startups where you built reliability practices from the ground up
Demonstrate incident response leadership including experience building incident management processes, conducting blameless post-mortems, and driving MTTR reduction initiatives in production environments
Utilize chaos engineering experience with tools like Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, or similar, including designing and executing game days and failure injection testing
Exhibit performance optimization experience with profiling, benchmarking, capacity planning, and system tuning at hyperscale including experience optimizing for high-throughput, low-latency systems
Show open source contributions or technical blog writing that demonstrates depth of expertise in reliability engineering, distributed systems, or production operations

Responsibilities

Own the overall reliability posture for the Metropolis platform, establishing practices, metrics, and systems that ensure 99.9%+ uptime across all services
Design and implement automatic failover mechanisms for critical external dependencies like Twilio for SMS/voice and Stripe for payments with circuit breakers, retry policies, and degraded mode operations
Architect and build active-passive or active-active regional deployment strategies with database replication, automated failover, and DNS-based traffic routing including disaster recovery planning and testing
Establish comprehensive monitoring using Datadog for APM, logs, and metrics correlation
Implement synthetic monitoring, SLO-based alerting, on-call rotation, and escalation policies while building service health dashboards that show customer impact
Own the incident management process including workflows, tooling, post-mortem culture, runbook automation, and MTTR reduction initiatives to drive down mean time to recovery from detection to resolution
Drive adoption of resilience patterns across all services including health checks, graceful degradation, feature flags, rate limiting, backpressure mechanisms, and chaos engineering practices
Build and maintain local mirrors for critical dependencies with artifact caching, dependency pinning, and vulnerability scanning to prevent build failures from upstream outages