Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability

Ironclad•San Francisco, CA

1d•$210,000 - $235,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Ironclad is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to help shape the cloud platform that powers the company. The role works with an experienced SRE team and engineering groups across Ironclad to identify reliability and scaling challenges, set technical direction, and lead solutions from design through production. The engineer will make architectural decisions, improve reliability and platform capabilities, maintain the performance and availability of relational and NoSQL data systems, reduce operational toil through automation, and strengthen SRE practices and resilience. The role also shares responsibility for production reliability through an on-call rotation that includes coverage outside business hours, incident response, complex investigations, and improvements to alerting, runbooks, and automation. The engineer will mentor colleagues and collaborate with product engineering, security, support, and customer-facing teams, including participating in customer escalations when needed. This is a hybrid position requiring office attendance at least twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with additional in-office days possible for team or company events. The stated base salary range is $210,000–$235,000, and the position offers a company bonus. The total rewards package also includes equity awards, health and wellness benefits, and career growth and development.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering, including technical leadership for business-critical systems.
At least 5 years developing and maintaining production software in TypeScript or Python, including tools and services.
Deep experience operating Kubernetes in production, including troubleshooting scheduling, networking, and resource issues at scale.
Hands-on experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure; GCP experience is preferred.
Production experience with relational and NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Redis, including query and index tuning, replication, monitoring, and scaling under load.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and GitOps tooling, such as Terraform or Pulumi, CircleCI, and Argo CD.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud storage architecture, and backup and recovery.
Experience using AI coding tools to improve engineering workflows, with judgment about their use and how to validate their output.
Strong troubleshooting skills, including moving from vague symptoms to root causes under pressure.
Clear written and verbal communication, including design documents and incident writeups that help teams make decisions and take action.
Track record of leading through influence and helping teams the candidate does not manage adopt better practices.
Collaborative approach focused on delivering meaningful improvements, sharing credit, and helping others succeed.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing or operating multi-region systems.
Experience sharding databases or operating databases on Kubernetes.
Experience running AI or LLM infrastructure in production.
Experience leading large-scale database, cluster, or service migrations with minimal downtime, including planning, sequencing, rollback, and stakeholder communication.
Experience building security into infrastructure and delivery pipelines and maintaining it through ongoing operations; FedRAMP experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

Help set the technical direction for SRE and the cloud platform; partner across Ironclad to identify needs, prioritize improvements, and develop a roadmap for reliability, capacity, and platform capabilities.
Identify reliability risks and design and deliver production changes that reduce risk and prevent recurring failures.
Make architectural tradeoffs across security, scalability, and performance, and document decisions.
Monitor, tune, and scale relational and NoSQL database systems, addressing capacity and performance issues proactively.
Improve build, test, deployment, monitoring, and recovery processes through automation that prevents errors and makes operations repeatable.
Strengthen SRE practices, including SLOs, incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning.
Design and test backup, recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities, and improve data durability across storage and distributed systems.
Participate in the SRE on-call rotation, including coverage outside business hours; respond to incidents, lead complex investigations, and improve alerting, runbooks, and automation.
Mentor engineers, review designs and code, and share knowledge.
Partner with product engineering, security, support, and customer-facing teams; join customer escalations when needed and investigate issues across unfamiliar parts of the product.

Benefits

Company bonus.
Equity awards, including a new-hire grant and opportunities for additional awards during employment.
100% health coverage for employees (medical, dental, and vision); 75% coverage for dependents, with buy-up plan options.
Gender-neutral parental leave and compassionate leave.
Family-forming support through Maven for employees and their partners.
Paid time off.
Monthly stipends for wellbeing, hybrid work, and, if applicable, cell phone use.
Mental health support through Modern Health, including therapy, coaching, and digital tools.
Pre-tax commuter benefits for US employees.
401(k) plan with Fidelity and employer match for US employees.
Regular team events.
Career growth and development.