Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Improve the reliability, performance, and operational maturity of a platform
that supports the future of educational fundraising.
CONTRACT-TO-HIRE REMOTE - UNITED STATES SEATTLE / WEST COAST PREFERRED
About the role
Our client is looking for a hands-on Senior Site Reliability Engineer to improve
the reliability, performance, and operational maturity of our platform. With our
migration to AWS complete, this role will focus on strengthening our production
environment: improving observability, automating infrastructure and operational
work, enhancing incident response, and partnering with product engineers to
build resilient systems. This is a high-impact role for someone who understands
both infrastructure and application development. You will work across the stack,
contribute code when appropriate, and help ensure our systems remain secure,
scalable, and dependable as we grow.
What you'll do
• Operate, maintain, and improve our production infrastructure in AWS.
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Improve monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and service-level indicators using
New Relic or comparable observability platforms.
• Reduce alert noise and build systems that identify problems before customers
are affected.
• Participate in the 24/7 on-call rotation and help coordinate the response to
production incidents.
• Lead blameless postmortems and ensure corrective actions result in durable
improvements.
• Partner with product engineers to diagnose performance and reliability issues
throughout the application stack.
• Improve application resilience through appropriate use of timeouts, retries,
queuing, backpressure, and idempotency.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment practices using platforms such as
GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI.
• Automate repetitive operational work and reduce engineering toil.
• Create and maintain runbooks, system diagrams, troubleshooting guides, and
production documentation.
• Support capacity planning, performance testing, database reliability, and
production-readiness reviews.
• Collaborate with Security and Engineering teams on infrastructure hardening,
access controls, logging, and compliance-related operational practices.
• Mentor engineers and promote effective reliability practices across the
Engineering organization
What we're looking for
• 10+ years of overall software engineering, infrastructure, or systems
experience, including at least 5 years in an SRE, Platform Engineering, DevOps,
or production operations role.
• Previous professional software development experience and the ability to read,
debug, and contribute to application code. • Strong, hands-on experience
operating production workloads in AWS. • Experience building and maintaining
infrastructure with Terraform or a similar infrastructure-as-code tool.
• Strong observability skills using New Relic, Datadog, or another modern
monitoring platform. • Experience with incident response, on-call operations,
postmortems, and production troubleshooting.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Working knowledge of networking, Linux, distributed systems, and relational
databases.
• Strong judgment when balancing immediate operational needs with long-term
maintainability.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across
engineering disciplines.
• A track record of using automation to improve reliability and create leverage
for other engineers.
Bonus points
• Experience with Ruby or Ruby on Rails.
• Strong PostgreSQL administration or performance-tuning experience.
• Experience operating enterprise SaaS products at scale.
• Familiarity with SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, capacity modeling, and load
testing.
• Experience with payments, fintech, or other highly regulated systems.
• Experience supporting SOC 2 or similar security and compliance programs. Role
details
• Contract-to-hire.
• Remote within the United States.
• Seattle-area or West Coast candidates are preferred to support occasional
in-person collaboration, but exceptional candidates elsewhere should also be
considered.
• Participation in a shared on-call rotation is required.