Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Sezzle; United States; Remote; USD 78,120 - 133,920; Full time

Job summary

Sezzle is seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to shape and scale our infrastructure across a distributed microservices architecture. You will own designing resilient systems, leading reliability initiatives, and championing best practices in observability, security, and CI/CD.

You will collaborate with cross‑functional teams to translate business goals into technical roadmaps, drive AI enablement efforts, and mentor engineers in pursuit of operational excellence in a fast‑paced fintech

Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience including SRE/back-end work.
• Strong proficiency in Golang and RESTful APIs.
• Experience with SQL-based RDBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and query optimization for scale.
• Proficiency with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic).
• Understanding of distributed systems design patterns (e.g., transactional outbox, event-driven arch).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Architect, upgrade, design, and build scalable infrastructure solutions using Kubernetes, AWS, and RDS.
• Lead the infrastructure team's roadmap for reliability, recoverability, and scalability.
• Drive capacity planning, benchmarking, and stress testing; identify bottlenecks for growth.
• Define and enforce SLAs, alerts, and observability standards across teams.
• Mentor engineers and promote learning, innovation, and operational excellence.

Skills

Golang

RESTful APIs

Observability tools

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

MySQL/PostgreSQL

Job description

The salary range for this role is negotiable, the range being $7000 - $12000 per month (Gross in USD)

About Sezzle:

With a mission to financially empower the next generation, Sezzle is revolutionizing the shopping experience beyond payments, blending cutting-edge tech with seamless, interest‑free installment plans that make shopping smarter and more accessible. We’re not just transforming payments; we’re redefining how people discover, interact with, and purchase the things they love while driving real impact on merchant sales through increased conversions and higher order values. As we continue to shape the future of fintech and retail, we’re building an innovative, dynamic team passionate about creating more than just a transaction but a truly unique shopping journey. If you’re excited about pushing boundaries in tech and delivering a game‑changing experience for consumers and merchants alike, come join us at Sezzle and help create the future of shopping!

Compensation:

For this principal development role, with 12+ years of experience, the compensation range is $7000 - $12000 USD per month. This range acknowledges the extensive expertise, leadership capabilities, and significant contributions expected at this level, offering a competitive salary to reflect the value of advanced skills and experience.

About the Role:

We are seeking a talented and motivated best-in‑class Principal Site Reliability Engineer. This role presents an exciting opportunity to thrive in a dynamic, fast‑paced environment within a rapidly growing team, with abundant prospects for career advancement.As a Principal SRE with Sezzle, you will have a high degree of autonomy and authority to identify and resolve problems you see in our infrastructure, deployments, operational workload, and overall systems.

You should consider yourself a DOer to be a good fit for this role. We expect you to bring a deep well of experience to play, and with AI tooling, you should be a force for scaling in the organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, upgrade, design, and build scalable infrastructure solutions leveraging Kubernetes, AWS, RDS (MySQL/Postgres), and modern distributed patterns.
• Help drive the infrastructure team’s roadmap, leading us to higher levels of reliability, recoverability, and scalability.
• Drive capacity planning, benchmarking, and work with the team to stress test our systems, find bottlenecks, and prepare for further growth in the business.
• Define, maintain and enforce SLAs and alerts across our infrastructure.
• Lead the teams towards stronger signal anomaly detection, better, more flexible alerting.
• Help Lead Sezzle’s AI enablement efforts, identifying opportunities to apply AI and automation to enhance infrastructure reliability, developer productivity, and internal tooling.
• Build in consistency and scalability across a distributed microservices architecture while maintaining performance and reliability.
• Establish and evolve engineering best practices for observability, security, and CI/CD across teams.
• Mentor engineers and champion a culture of learning, innovation, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to translate business goals into technical roadmaps and deliver results that matter.

Minimum Requirements

• 12+ years of professional software engineering or infrastructure engineering experience, including significant SRE and backend experience.
• Deployed significant changes to a production application or infrastructure configuration in the past 30 days.
• Strong proficiency in Golang, with experience building and maintaining RESTful APIs.
• Expertise with SQL-based RDBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and experience optimizing schema and queries for performance at scale.
• Proficiency in observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems design patterns (e.g., transactional outbox, event-driven architecture and stream processing, queues).
• Demonstrated ability to bring new ideas forward, influence decisions, and lead complex technical initiatives.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Knowledge and Skills

• Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure, mainly AWS Aurora RDS, both MySQL and Postgres.
• Experience with data engineering, data pipelines and data warehousing.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deploying containerized microservices in Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with AI developer tooling like Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Cursor and using it to be a more productive engineer.
• Track record of shipping commercial APIs and data-driven applications in high-growth environments.
• Proven leadership in guiding technical direction, improving system reliability, and scaling high-traffic services.

About You

• You have relentlessly high standards - many people may think your standards are unreasonably high. You are continually raising the bar and driving those around you to deliver great results. You make sure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
• You’re not bound by convention - your success—and much of the fun—lies in developing new ways to do things
• You need action - speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.
• You earn trust - you listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully.
• You have backbone; disagree, then commit - you can respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. You have conviction and are tenacious. You do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, you commit wholly.
• You deliver results - you focus on the key inputs and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, you rise to the occasion and never settle.

Sezzle’s Technology Stack

• Languages: Golang, Typescript, Python
• Frontend: Typescript - React and React Native
• Backend: Golang
• Database: MySQL, Postgres, Elasticsearch
• DevOps & Cloud: AWS, Kubernetes
• Version Control: Git
• CI/CD: Gitlab
• Testing: Developer and AI-driven, focus on automated end-to-end, integration, and unit tests
• Open Source: Sezzle is focused on using open source, and we build what we can before buying!

What Makes Working at Sezzle Awesome?

At Sezzle, we are more than just brilliant engineers, passionate data enthusiasts, out-of-the-box thinkers, and determined innovators; we are skilled musicians, yogis, cyclists, chefs, golfers, dog-lovers, and rock-climbers. We believe in surrounding ourselves with not only the best and the brightest individuals, but those that are unique and purpose-driven in all that they do. Our culture is not defined by a certain set of perks designed to give the illusion of the traditional startup culture, but rather, it is the visible example living in every employee that we hire.

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