Principal SRE

WebHosting; United States; Remote; USD 215,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

ESPP program

Job summary

Backblaze is seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to ensure stability, scalability, and reliability of production systems. You will lead cross-functional efforts across engineering, operations, and product, driving automation and AI-assisted improvements to meet customer demand.

In this senior role, you will own service health metrics, participate in on-call rotations, and design robust monitoring, incident response, and post-incident reviews.

Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of distributed systems and reliability engineering.
• Experience with monitoring, SRE practices, and incident response.
• Proficiency with automation, scripting, and IaC tools.

Responsibilities

• Own availability and durability of critical services in production.
• Lead cross-functional projects from discovery to resolution.
• Define SLIs/SLOs and manage error budgets and alerts.

Job description

Remote Full-time Senior Product

Job Description

About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking aPrincipal SREto join our team!

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience collaborating in cross functional teams to manage the design, implementation and ongoing management of the Backblaze core infrastructure. You will be approved to demonstrate strong observability skills, process and service improvement and ability to leverage AI and automation to assist to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand..

As a technical leader in Backblaze you will be expected to work across the organisation to achieve our goals. This will include working with our executives and customers. The role will focus long term strategic focus on platform stability.

Key Responsibilities

Service Reliability & Operations

• Own the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and accountability for outcomes.
• Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.
• Assist and advise on the design of service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and elevate issues when thresholds are at risk; partner with service owners to define/iterate SLIs/SLOs and establish error budget policies and alerting.
• Participate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
• Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).

Architect and Design

• Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
• Collaborate with engineering on overall storage design, performance expectation against product SLAs.
• Define the monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
• Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.
• Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
• Work with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products.
• Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
• Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.
• Lead cross functional teams to identify gaps in observability, operations process and define overall prioritization strategy.
• Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing those improvements.
• Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.

Education & Experience

Technical Skills

Preferred Attributes

• ESPP program

Pay Transparency

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.

The pay range for this position is$215,000 to $250,000 per year.

At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.