Platform Engineer - Reliability

Squarepoint; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Squarepoint in Houston, Texas is seeking a Platform Reliability Specialist responsible for ensuring stability and performance of platform services. This role involves enhancing reliability practices through software engineering and operational ownership, collaborating with developers and infrastructure teams.

Candidates should have a minimum of 4 years in relevant roles, with expertise in system administration, Python, and observability systems. The position is geared towards making significant improvements to platform operations and reliability standards.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in SRE, Production Engineering, or Reliability Engineering roles with direct ownership of production systems.
• Experience with system administration and troubleshooting (Linux, Bash, containers).
• Software development experience with Python, version control (Git), and CI/CD systems.
• Hands-on experience with observability systems including metrics, tracing, log pipelines, and alert design.
• Demonstrated experience running systems at scale, including performance tuning, HA/DR architectures, and resilience engineering.

Responsibilities

• Own and improve day‑to‑day platform operations by streamlining workflows.
• Work with service owners to improve resilience and performance.
• Build and maintain platform tools and automation.
• Capture and share reliability knowledge through documentation.
• Help define and evolve reliability standards across the platform.

Skills

SRE

Production Engineering

Reliability Engineering

Python

Git

CI/CD

Linux

Observability systems

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK

Kubernetes

Ansible

Terraform

Job description

As a Platform Reliability Specialist at Squarepoint, you will play a critical role in ensuring the stability, performance, and day to day reliability of the shared platform services. You will work with a diverse group of stakeholders, including developers, researchers, and infrastructure teams, to maintain highly reliable systems and drive proactive improvements.

You will be responsible for reducing operational toil, improving response and learning from production issues, and evolving our reliability practices. This role blends software engineering, platform ownership, operational ownership, and long‑term architectural thinking to enhance our production systems. While you may have deep expertise in one or more areas, you will contribute across the platform.

Key areas include:

• Operations & Toil Reduction: Own and improve day‑to‑day platform operations by streamlining workflows and enhancing on‑call ergonomics through better automations and runbooks
• Reliability Engineering & Hardening: Work with service owners to apply engineering principles to improve resilience and performance: harden critical services against degradation and outages.
• Tooling & Automation: Build and maintain platform tools, automation, and GitOps workflows that make it easy for teams to deploy, operate, and observe their services with minimal friction and operational overhead.
• Knowledge & Standards: Capture and share reliability knowledge through documentation, runbooks, and post‑incident reviews. Help define and evolve reliability standards and best practices across the platform.

Required qualifications

• 4+ years in SRE, Production Engineering, or Reliability Engineering roles with direct ownership of production systems.
• Experience with system administration and troubleshooting (Linux, Bash, containers).
• Software development experience with Python, version control (Git), and CI/CD systems.
• Hands‑on experience with observability systems including metrics, tracing, log pipelines, and alert design.
• Demonstrated experience running systems at scale, including performance tuning, HA/DR architectures, and resilience engineering.

Nice to have

• Expertise in a modern observability stack (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, VictoriaMetrics).
• Experience operating enterprise platform software such as Kubernetes clusters, GitLab at scale, or Slurm environments.
• Familiarity with messaging systems (Kafka/RabbitMQ), service discovery (Consul), and databases (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis).
• Experience authoring runbooks, running failure/chaos experiments, and participating in DR exercises.
• Infrastructure automation and configuration management experience (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, Puppet).