Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Lightspeed Commerce; Montreal (administrative region); On-site; CAD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible paid time off policies

Equity options

Pension contributions

Training opportunities to grow skills

Health and wellness credit

Time off to volunteer

Interest groups and employee networks

Computer purchase program

Job summary

Lightspeed Commerce in Montreal, Canada is seeking a Staff Data Site Reliability Engineer to strengthen the Data Office infrastructure and ensure a reliable, scalable data platform. You will own platform reliability and lead end-to-end infra projects, while mentoring engineers and coordinating with data science and BI teams to optimize Looker and Vertex AI workflows.

You’ll drive improvements in IaC, observability, and security, shaping data infrastructure across the org and communicating

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in GCP compute, networking, IAM, GKE and data services with a product mindset.
• Proficient in Terraform and IaC practices for production-grade infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with Looker infrastructure and ML/AI tooling (Vertex AI, model serving).
• Proficient in Bash and Go; Python is a plus for data tooling.
• Strong metrics, logs, traces, alerting and SLO/SLI design in DataDog ecosystems.
• Excellent cross-team communication and ability to articulate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Security-first approach to design decisions with awareness of compliance needs.
• Ability to mentor and train other engineers in the team.

Responsibilities

• Own and advance Data Office infrastructure engineering practices and high-leverage projects.
• Lead architecture discussions, review critical PRs, and provide technical direction.
• Manage on-call rotations and incident response, ensuring rapid MTTR.
• Mentor Senior and Intermediate SREs, improving IaC quality and observability.
• Collaborate with BI and data science teams on Looker/Vertex AI workflows.

Skills

GCP expertise

Terraform IaC

Looker infra & ML tooling

Bash & Go

Python (data tooling)

Observability & SRE practices

Security minded

Mentoring others

Tools

Terraform

Looker

Vertex AI

GCP services

Cloud Build / CI tools

Datadog

GitHub Actions

Job description

Hi there! Thanks for stopping by Are you actively looking for a new opportunity? Or just checking the market? Well… you might just be in the right place!

Hi there! Thanks for stopping by Are you actively looking for a new opportunity? Or just checking the market? Well… you might just be in the right place!

We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join our Data team in Canada.

As a Staff Data SRE, you are the technical backbone of the Data Office's infrastructure platform. Your scope spans the entire Data Business Unit — you solve systemic, platform-level problems, not individual tickets. You own the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of the data platform, and you act as a force multiplier: making the engineers around you faster, the systems more resilient, and the platform easier to consume.

You bring deep GCP expertise and a product mindset to data infrastructure. You are comfortable navigating ML/AI workload requirements (Vertex AI, feature stores, training pipelines) and can reason confidently about the BI tooling and data layers that feed it (Looker, BigQuery). Your decisions carry weight across teams, and you communicate them clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Please note this role is based in Montreal, Canada

What You’ll Be Doing

• You will own and be accountable for advancing the Data Office infrastructure engineering practices and delivering high-leverage platform projects. Your time will be distributed as follows:
  • 70% – Hands-On Engineering & Platform Ownership: Design and deliver significant infrastructure improvements. You write production-quality IaC (Terraform), lead solutions from design through delivery, and are the person the team calls for the hardest platform problems. This includes data infrastructure for batch/streaming workloads, ML/AI environments (Vertex AI, model serving, GPU-backed compute), and the BI serving layer (Looker infrastructure and GCP integration).
  • 10% – Team Coordination & Technical Leadership: Lead architecture and design discussions for larger cross-team projects. You review critical PRs, drive solution design sessions, and provide technical direction that keeps the team coherent and moving forward.
  • 10% – General Meetings: Lead conversations in agile ceremonies, incident reviews, and cross-functional syncs. You shift from participant to driver.
  • 10% – Mentorship & Technical Review: Actively mentor Senior and Intermediate SREs. You set the bar for IaC quality, observability practices, and operational discipline through reviews, pairing, and documentation.
• Avoiding Pitfalls: You proactively identify risks in complex data migrations or infrastructure changes and propose mitigation strategies to ensure zero data loss and minimal downtime.

And a little bit of…

• Participating in on-call rotation and incident response.
• Contributing as part of the wider team to achieve organization-wide objectives even if this means doing things that aren't strictly within the scope of your role.

What You Need To Bring

• GCP Infrastructure: Deep expertise across GCP compute, networking, IAM, GKE, data services, and FinOps.
• IaC Proficiency: Terraform as primary tool.
• Hands‑on experience with Looker infrastructure and ML/AI platform tooling (Vertex AI, model serving, training pipelines).
• Proficient in Bash and Golang; Python a plus for data tooling.
• Strong experience with metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and SLO/SLI design, DataDog,...
• Product Mindset: You focus on making the platform easy to use, not just "available."
• Experience with Github actions, Circle CI, GCP Cloud Build, …
• Ability to communicate infrastructure trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• AI proficiency, Go-to AI expertise within the Data BU — evaluates tooling, drives cross‑team AI‑first development practices.
• Security‑First Mindset, every design decision evaluated through a security and compliance lens.
• Self‑awareness with a willingness to learn and improve.
• Ability to mentor and train other Engineers in the team.

We know that people are more than what’s on their CV.

Be a changemaker

You’ll Enjoy

• A flexible work environment that empowers you to do your best work
• A culture that celebrates performance
• The chance to make an impact in a team that’s big enough for career growth, but lean enough to make your voice heard
• Career-defining opportunities

Plus benefits designed to keep you happy, healthy and fulfilled.

• Flexible paid time off and remote work policies
• Equity options, because this is your company too
• Contributions to your pension plan. Your future matters
• Training opportunities to grow your skills and career
• Health and wellness credit so you feel your best
• Time off to volunteer and give back to your community
• Interest groups, employee led networks, social committees to sponsored sports teams
• Computer purchase program to get your personal Macbook
• Enhanced parental leave to support growing families

Fuel your growth. Find your people.

At Lightspeed, your growth is our priority. We invest in you with continuous learning opportunities, global mobility and benefits designed to support you—all within a driven, diverse and inclusive team that’s passionate about empowering our communities

Please note that we ask applicants to disclose any criminal convictions, and we conduct criminal record checks as part of our hiring process for this role.

Lightspeed is a proud equal opportunity employer and we are committed to creating an inclusive and barrier‑free workplace. Lightspeed welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Where to from here?

Obviously, this has to be mutually beneficial: we want you to step into a role you love, and we want to offer you a place you’re proud to come to every day.

Lightspeed is building communities through commerce, and we need people from all backgrounds and lived experiences to do that. We were founded in 2005, in Montreal’s gay village and our original members were all part of the LGBTQ+ community. The ethos of our business has been about inclusion from the very beginning, and we strive to provide a workplace where everyone belongs.

Who We Are

Powering the businesses that are the backbone of the global economy, Lightspeed's one-stop commerce platform helps merchants innovate to simplify, scale, and provide exceptional customer experiences. Our