Senior Backend Reliability Engineer - Scale & Performance

Box; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Box is seeking a senior Reliability Engineer to help scale our distributed backend systems in a high-traffic, cloud-native environment. You will partner with product and platform teams to identify bottlenecks, design performance validation, and drive automation across CI/CD pipelines for proactive reliability.

The role emphasizes hands-on performance optimization, observability improvements, and cross-team collaboration to ensure world-class platform resilience and scalability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, performance engineering, or site reliability engineering.
• Proficient in Go or Java for building performant services.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, resource contention, and efficient design.
• Hands-on experience analyzing and improving performance across compute, storage, database, and networking layers.
• Familiarity with load testing and performance benchmarking tools (Locust, JMeter, Gatling, or similar).
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and Kubernetes.
• Proficient with observability tools and telemetry systems (Prometheus, Chronosphere, Grafana, Datadog, ELK).
• Excellent problem-solving and data-driven approach; strong collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product and platform teams to assess service designs for scalability and performance risks.
• Analyze production workloads, metrics, and load test results to identify bottlenecks and scaling limits.
• Design and build frameworks for load testing, capacity modeling, and performance validation.
• Drive improvements in backend service efficiency, API response times, and resource utilization.
• Collaborate with SRE, infrastructure, and platform teams to optimize scaling strategies and auto-scaling policies.
• Build automation and tooling to integrate performance validation into CI/CD pipelines.
• Participate in root cause analysis of performance incidents and drive cross-team remediation.
• Contribute to observability standards (SLIs, SLOs, latency budgets) to guide service health.

Skills

Go or Java

Distributed systems

Back-end performance

Collaboration

Tools

Locust

JMeter

Gatling

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Job description

Box is seeking a senior Reliability Engineer to help scale our distributed backend systems in a high-traffic, cloud-native environment. You will partner with product and platform teams to identify bottlenecks, design performance validation, and drive automation across CI/CD pipelines for proactive reliability.

The role emphasizes hands-on performance optimization, observability improvements, and cross-team collaboration to ensure world-class platform resilience and scalability.