Senior Site Reliability Engineer
About the role
Novellia is a Series A health tech startup focused on providing comprehensive, patient-authorized longitudinal health insights to accelerate biopharma innovation. As the first Site Reliability Engineer, you will play a crucial role in establishing the reliability foundations for the company's growing operations.
What You'll Do
Design the human side of reliability: on-call rotations, incident roles and communication, blameless postmortems, and change management that adds safety without adding drag.
Help shape the platform roadmap: bring us the problems you're seeing, propose solutions, and own them through to adoption.
Build and operate the core reliability toolkit: observability (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting), CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and incident response.
Embed with product engineers to make services more operable, and to raise the operational literacy of the whole team rather than becoming its single point of failure.
Define our first SLOs in partnership with product and engineering stakeholders, grounded in what actually matters to patients and customers rather than what's easy to measure.
Investigate incidents and recurring pain end to end, and be equally willing to conclude "this needs a process change" as "this needs a code change."
Contribute to the compliance and security posture that health data demands (audit trails, access controls, environment isolation), working alongside the Head of Platform Engineering.
What We're Looking For
5+ years in SRE, platform, DevOps, or backend roles with meaningful production ownership: you've carried a pager, owned services through real incidents, and made systems measurably better afterward.
Comfortable in at least one general-purpose language (Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar), and willing to go into application code and change it when that's where the fix lives.
A track record of solving problems, not just closing tickets. You can walk us through real problems you identified, how you decided what to do, and what changed as a result.
Evidence you treat process as a legitimate engineering tool: you've improved a review workflow, restructured an on-call, introduced a postmortem practice, or otherwise fixed something by changing how people work.
Strong collaboration instincts: you seek out the people affected by a problem, listen well, write clearly, and bring stakeholders along rather than presenting them with a finished decision.
Self-directed and used to operating without a playbook. You'll get problems and a close working partner, not a queue of tasks, and you're comfortable setting direction others will build on.
Nice to Have
Experience in a regulated environment (healthcare, fintech) or working with HIPAA, SOC 2, or similar frameworks.
You've been an early or first infrastructure/reliability hire and know what greenfield ownership actually feels like day to day.
Experience introducing reliability practices to teams that didn't have them.
Benefits & Perks
Equity in Novellia
Medical, dental, and vision coverage
401(k)
Flexible time off
Wellness stipend
Up to 12 weeks of parental leave
Why This Role Is a Good Bet
Ground-floor ownership of reliability at a funded, growing company, with direct influence on architecture, process, and eventually hiring.
A manager dedicated to building a healthy engineering organization, valuing process and people solutions rather than treating them as overhead.
Health tech means the reliability work has stakes that matter. Real patients depend on what you keep running, and on us handling their data with the privacy and transparency we promise them.
Compensation Range
$150K - $200K