Senior Site Reliability Engineer — Reliability & Automation

Panera Bread; Saint Louis (LA); Hybrid; USD 112,000 - 134,000; Full time

Job summary

Panera Bread is seeking a Senior Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer to lead reliability practices across critical platforms. You will define SLOs/SLIs, drive reliability through automation, and collaborate with Architecture, Security, and Product teams to build highly available, scalable systems at scale.

The role emphasizes IaC, CI/CD, and robust observability with a focus on reducing operational toil and improving customer experience. Hybrid work model in St. Louis, MO is offered.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering or related fields.
• Deep experience with cloud-native and distributed systems in public cloud environments (GCP preferred).
• Strong expertise in reliability concepts: SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, availability modeling, scalability, resiliency, performance engineering.
• Hands-on IaC experience with Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.
• Observability strategies across monitoring, logging, tracing, and APM platforms.
• Strong software engineering and scripting: Python, Go, Java, Bash.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines and modern software delivery practices.
• Understanding of networking, OS, security, databases, and app architectures.
• Proven ability to perform deep technical troubleshooting in distributed environments.
• Excellent communication and collaboration to influence decisions across teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve SRE practices for mission-critical apps and distributed systems.
• Define and govern SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to measure reliability.
• Drive reliability improvements via automation, self-healing, and toil reduction.
• Embed reliability, scalability, security, and observability into architecture and development lifecycles.
• Develop IaC, platform automation, CI/CD pipelines, and reliability tooling.
• Lead reliability reviews, architecture assessments, and resiliency testing including chaos engineering.
• Design observability solutions with metrics, logs, traces, and synthetic monitoring.
• Analyze production performance and failure patterns to drive long-term improvements.
• Collaborate with development to optimize performance, scalability, and cloud efficiency.
• Provide technical leadership during incidents and root-cause analysis.
• Promote engineering best practices for high availability, DR, and business continuity.
• Establish standards, reference architectures, and patterns for scalable services.
• Mentor engineers and act as SME in SRE and cloud architecture.

Skills

SRE concepts

SLOs/SLIs

Error budgets

Terraform

CloudFormation

Kubernetes

Python

Go

Java

Bash

CI/CD

Observability

Dynatrace

Datadog

New Relic

OpenTelemetry

AppDynamics

Cloud architecture

Networking

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Kubernetes

Job description

Panera Bread is seeking a Senior Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer to lead reliability practices across critical platforms. You will define SLOs/SLIs, drive reliability through automation, and collaborate with Architecture, Security, and Product teams to build highly available, scalable systems at scale.

The role emphasizes IaC, CI/CD, and robust observability with a focus on reducing operational toil and improving customer experience. Hybrid work model in St. Louis, MO is offered.