Senior Site Reliability Engineer II

Waystar; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive total rewards (base salary

Bonus potential

Flexible time off

Professional development and LinkedIn/

401(k) with company match

Health/dental/vision insurance

Paid holidays

Remote? not specified

Job summary

Waystar is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer II to drive reliability, scalability, and performance across critical platforms in our Austin-based team. The role emphasizes automation, observability, and operational excellence, partnering with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to ensure resilient systems.

The candidate will lead and mentor teams, shape reliability initiatives early in development, and contribute to deployment pipelines and incident management with a focus on

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or related field.
• Deep experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, and/or Azure.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes and containerized environments.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Strong knowledge of observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, etc.).
• Experience designing, supporting, and troubleshooting distributed systems at scale.
• Strong scripting or programming skills in Python, PowerShell, or similar languages.
• Experience building and supporting CI/CD pipelines and automation frameworks.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical initiatives and influence across teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize solutions to improve reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Define and manage SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Drive automation to reduce operational overhead and improve stability.
• Lead major production incidents and root cause analyses; implement long-term fixes.
• Mentor engineers and promote reliability best practices across teams.
• Collaborate with software engineering to improve deployment pipelines and system design.
• Improve observability with metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting; build dashboards and automated recovery.

Job description

ABOUT THIS POSITION

We are seeking a highly skilled and proactive Senior Site Reliability Engineering II (SRE) to help drive reliability, scalability, and performance across our critical platforms. This role is ideal for a senior engineer who combines deep technical expertise with a passion for automation, observability, and operational excellence.

As a Senior Specialist, you will tackle complex reliability challenges, lead technical initiatives, and partner closely with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to ensure our systems remain resilient, scalable, and efficient.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Reliability Engineering

• Design, implement, and optimize solutions that improve system reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Define, measure, and manage Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets.
• Drive automation initiatives that reduce operational overhead and improve system stability.
• Identify opportunities to enhance platform resilience and operational efficiency.

Incident Management & Root Cause Analysis

• Serve as a technical lead during major production incidents and service disruptions.
• Conduct thorough root cause analyses and implement long-term corrective actions.
• Champion blameless postmortems and continuous improvement practices.
• Develop and enhance incident response, recovery, and escalation processes.

Technical Leadership

• Lead cross-functional reliability and infrastructure initiatives.
• Mentor engineers and promote reliability best practices across teams.
• Influence architectural decisions to ensure reliability and scalability are incorporated early in the development lifecycle.
• Collaborate with software engineering teams to improve deployment pipelines, infrastructure, and system design.

Monitoring, Observability & Automation

• Improve observability through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting solutions.
• Build and maintain dashboards, monitoring tools, and automated recovery mechanisms.
• Continuously enhance system visibility, capacity planning, and operational readiness.
• Evaluate and implement tools that improve reliability, performance, and developer productivity.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Infrastructure Engineering, or a related field.
• Deep expertise with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, and/or Azure.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes and containerized environments.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Strong knowledge of observability platforms, including Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or similar tool
• Experience designing, supporting, and troubleshooting distributed systems at scale.
• Strong scripting or programming skills in Python, PowerShell, or similar languages.
• Experience building and supporting CI/CD pipelines and automation frameworks.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical initiatives and influence across teams.

AI & Innovation

• Active use of AI tools and technologies to improve productivity, innovation, and decision-making.
• Experience leveraging AI solutions to automate workflows and streamline operational processes.
• Curiosity and adaptability when evaluating emerging AI technologies and best practices.
• Commitment to continuous learning and experimentation with evolving AI capabilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting highly regulated or high-availability environments, such as healthcare, financial services, or other mission-critical industries.
• Familiarity with chaos engineering, performance optimization, and capacity planning methodologies.
• Software development experience with strong coding skills in Python, Go, Bash, or related languages.
• Experience implementing self-healing systems and automated remediation strategies.
• Background leading reliability initiatives in cloud-native environments.

What Success Looks Like

The ideal candidate is a hands-on reliability engineer who thrives on solving complex infrastructure challenges, automating repetitive work, improving platform resiliency, and helping engineering teams deliver reliable services at scale. They bring a strong ownership mindset, a passion for operational excellence, and a commitment to continuous improvement.

ABOUT WAYSTAR

Through a smart platform and better experience, Waystar helps providers simplify healthcare payments and yield powerful results throughout the complete revenue cycle.

Waystar’s healthcare payments platform combines innovative, cloud-based technology, robust data, and unparalleled client support to streamline workflows and improve financials so providers can focus on what matters most: their patients and communities. Waystar is trusted by 1M+ providers, 1K+ hospitals and health systems, and is connected to over 5K commercial and Medicaid/Medicare payers. We are deeply committed to living out our organizational values: honesty; kindness; passion; curiosity; fanatical focus; best work, always; making it happen; and joyful, optimistic & fun.

Waystar products have won multiple Best in KLAS® or Category Leader awards since 2010 and earned multiple #1 rankings from Black Book™ surveys since 2012. The Waystar platform supports more than 500,000 providers, 1,000 health systems and hospitals, and 5,000 payers and health plans. For more information, visit waystar.com or follow @Waystar (https://twitter.com/Waystar) on Twitter.

WAYSTAR PERKS

• Competitive total rewards (base salary + bonus, if applicable)
• Customizable benefits package (3 medical plans with Health Saving Account company match)
• We offer generous paid time off for our non-exempt team members, starting with 3 weeks + 13 paid holidays, including 2 personal floating holidays. We also offer flexible time off for our exempt team members + 13 paid holidays
• Paid parental leave (including maternity + paternity leave)
• Education assistance opportunities and free LinkedIn Learning access
• Free mental health and family planning programs, including adoption assistance and fertility support
• 401(K) program with company match
• Pet insurance
• Employee resource groups

Waystar is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We celebrate, value, and support diversity and inclusion. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, marital status, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

This applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.