Senior Real-Time Cloud Reliability Engineer

CloudZero; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

CloudZero is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, performance, and observability of our real-time ingestion path. You’ll be a force multiplier for our engineering organization, enabling teams to ship features that help customers optimize cloud spend.

This is real infrastructure work at scale, with a serverless architecture and light on-call. You’ll shape reliability for multiple services and empower teams to operate confidently in production.

Qualifications

• Strong production Python is your primary language and you own, test, and maintain it at scale.
• You have defined an SLO yourself and know what not to alert on.
• Experience operating asynchronous, event-driven systems and reasoning about back-pressure, lag, replay, poison messages, and partial failure (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, Pulsar, or Step Functions).
• You have driven reliability or platform changes across teams that didn’t report to you.
• 5+ years building and operating distributed systems in AWS.
• Infrastructure as Code in practice with CloudFormation/SAM or Terraform/Pulumi;
• Hands-on experience instrumenting systems in monitoring tools like Datadog, Prometheus, Sumo Logic, or Splunk.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability practice for CloudZero's real-time ingestion path, including SLOs across team boundaries and architectural changes.
• Sign off on shared critical paths before go-live and engage the pause conversation when an error budget is burned.
• Instrument systems so failures surface quickly and debugging is data-driven.
• Build observability into everything so you know about problems before customers do.
• Design and maintain CloudFormation/SAM modules that provision reliable cloud resources; own infrastructure end-to-end.
• Automate deployments, scaling, backups, and limit changes; replace repetitive work with systems.
• Collaborate with Product Eng to design resilient services and drive adoption of best practices across 40+ engineers.
• Drive cost and performance optimization, modeling CloudZero's own cloud usage as a case study.

Skills

Strong production Python

SLO definition

Event-driven systems

AWS distributed systems

Infrastructure as Code

Monitoring & observability

Debug under pressure

Explain technical issues

Breadth across areas

Chaos engineering / load testing

Tools

CloudFormation

SAM

Terraform

Pulumi

Datadog

Prometheus

Sumo Logic

GitHub Actions

Backstage/Cortex

Job description

CloudZero is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, performance, and observability of our real-time ingestion path. You’ll be a force multiplier for our engineering organization, enabling teams to ship features that help customers optimize cloud spend.

This is real infrastructure work at scale, with a serverless architecture and light on-call. You’ll shape reliability for multiple services and empower teams to operate confidently in production.