Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Starrez; Indiana (PA); Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Starrez in Indiana, Pennsylvania, is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to enhance system performance and reliability while supporting SaaS products. You’ll leverage your PHP development experience along with DevOps practices in a global team environment.

The role involves technical leadership, implementing automation strategies, and collaborating with engineering teams to ensure high availability and scalability in production environments. Starrez promotes diversity and invites all qualified candidates to apply.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in Platform Engineering or Software Engineering role.
• 1+ year experience working on a SaaS platform.
• Proficient in PHP and containerization technologies.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and mentoring.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and logging systems.
• Conduct performance tests to identify bottlenecks.

Skills

PHP Development

Cloud Platforms

DevOps/Infrastructure

Kubernetes

Infrastructure as Code

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or similar

Tools

Terraform

DataDog

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

About StarRez

StarRez is the global leader in student housing software, providing innovative solutions for on and off‑campus housing management, resident wellness and experience, and revenue generation. Trusted by 1,400+ clients across 25+ countries, StarRez supports more than 4 million beds annually with its user‑friendly, all‑in‑one platform, delivering seamless experiences for students and administrators. With offices in the United States, Australia, the UK, and India, StarRez blends the robust capabilities of a global organization with the personalized care and service of a trusted partner.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer with a Software Engineering background to join our rapidly growing global team supporting SaaS products. You are an experienced PHP developer with proficiency in DevOps/Infrastructure tooling and expertise in cloud platforms and operations.

In this role, you will apply your Software Engineering experience to enhance system performance and reliability, as well as building internal systems and capabilities that eliminate manual work through automation. You'll be joining our Platforms teams with globally dispersed Site Reliability and Platform Engineers in a "follow the sun" model to operate our products on a multi‑region cloud platform.

What You Will Own

• Provide technical leadership and mentoring within the team through knowledge sharing sessions, pair programming, code reviews and solution design
• Identify and implement solutions to improve platform reliability, including the creation of mitigation strategies and operational playbooks
• Implement and maintain monitoring, alerting and logging systems to identify and respond to incidents
• Conduct/participate in Root Cause Analyses (RCAs) and blameless post‑mortems
• Participate in on‑call rotations to ensure system reliability and rapid incident response
• Ensure scalability and efficiency of cloud infrastructure and systems to handle traffic and data growth
• Conduct performance tests to identify and remediate bottlenecks
• Develop and maintain platform solutions, automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and management tasks using Infrastructure as Code
• Monitor, review and tune databases to ensure high availability and performance
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to design/build fit‑for‑purpose and observable software
• Contribute and collaborate across teams to define Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as required

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or similar
• Proven experience (3 years or more) in a Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering or Software Engineering role
• Experience (1+ year) working on a SaaS platform
• Recent and proficient experience in PHP development
• Production experience operating containerization technologies (Kubernetes)
• Proficiency with one or more public cloud providers such as Azure, AWS or GCP
• Proficiency using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform (preferred), Ansible, or CloudFormation
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using languages like Bash, PowerShell or Python
• Experience with monitoring, observability and logging tools such as DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar
• Proven track record of maintaining highly available and performant production environments
• Ability to identify and implement effective mitigation strategies and operational playbooks

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in CI/CD tooling: Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy
• Relevant certifications in cloud platforms (e.g., Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect) and DevOps practices (e.g., Certified Kubernetes Administrator) are a plus
• Experience in database management/performance tuning, particularly MSSQL

Even if you don't have all of the Preferred Qualifications listed above, but feel you have what it takes to succeed in the role, we would love to hear from you!

StarRez is an equal opportunity employer.

We are proud of our diverse workforce and are dedicated to creating a safe and welcoming environment for all employees. People from various ethnicities, ages, genders, and abilities are encouraged to apply.