Sr. Site Reliability Engineer
Practice by Numbers · Redmond, WA · 3 mo ago
HybridEngineering$120k–$150k/yrFull-time
About the role
This is an engineering-first Senior SRE role. We're looking for Senior Engineers who have built and shipped significant backend systems and/or distributed platforms, owned services end-to-end in production, led incident response, and improved reliability.
Responsibilities
- Own reliability outcomes for critical services: availability, latency, incident rate, and recovery time.
- Design and build reliable, scalable distributed systems that support mission-critical healthcare workflows.
- Define and operationalize Service Level Objectives (SLOs)/Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and error budgets; drive adoption across teams and use them to prioritize work.
- Lead incident response for high-severity issues; improve on-call effectiveness and reduce alert fatigue.
- Run blameless postmortems and ensure follow-ups are implemented, measured, and stick.
- Write software to eliminate operational toil: automation, self-service tooling, guardrails, and developer platforms.
- Raise the bar on observability (metrics/logs/traces), alerting strategy, and operational readiness.
- Improve resilience through capacity planning, load testing, performance tuning, and failure testing.
- Mentor engineers (SRE and product engineers) on reliability practices, debugging, and production ownership.
- Drive cross-team improvements like production readiness reviews, release safety (progressive delivery), and standard runbooks.
Requirements
- Engineering degree is mandatory: BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related engineering field.
- 6+ years experience in software engineering, SRE, infrastructure/platform engineering, or related.
- Strong programming skills in Go, Python, Java, or similar (production-quality code).
- Proven experience building and operating production backend services or distributed systems.
- Meaningful experience in on-call rotations, incident leadership, and post-incident improvement execution.
- Strong debugging ability across complex systems: latency, saturation, cascading failures, dependency issues.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred, GCP/Azure acceptable).
Qualifications
- Strong Signal: You've owned reliability for customer-facing services with clear, measurable improvements (e.g., higher availability, lower MTTR).
- You've built internal platforms/tooling that made other engineers faster and reduced operational burden.
- You've worked in an SRE culture with SLOs, error budgets, and blameless postmortems.
- You've led multi-quarter reliability initiatives spanning multiple teams/services.
Skills
- Tech stack: Cloud: AWS, Containers: Docker, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript, CI/CD: GitHub Actions.
Benefits
High impact: reliability work directly improves customer trust and revenue-critical operations.
Small team with high ownership, autonomy, and ability to influence architecture.
Strong engineering culture focused on automation, simplicity, and measurable outcomes.
Pay
The base pay range for this role is $120,000 – $150,000 per year.