Senior Software Engineer, Reliability

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 (NYSE:BOX) is the leader in Intelligent Content Management. Our platform enables organizations to fuel collaboration, manage the entire content lifecycle, secure critical content, and transform business workflows with enterprise AI. We help companies thrive in the new AI-first era of business. Founded in 2005, Box simplifies work for leading global organizations, including JLL, Morgan Stanley, and Nationwide. Box is headquartered in Redwood City, CA, with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

By joining Box, you will have the unique opportunity to continue driving our platform forward. Content powers how we work. It’s the billions of files and information flowing across teams, departments, and key business processes every single day: contracts, invoices, employee records, financials, product specs, marketing assets, and more. Our mission is to bring intelligence to the world of content management and empower our customers to completely transform workflows across their organizations. With the combination of AI and enterprise content, the opportunity has never been greater to transform how the world works together and at Box you will be on the front lines of this massive shift.

WHY BOX NEEDS YOU

The Reliability Engineering team at Box ensures our platform delivers world-class performance, scalability, and reliability as we continue to serve millions of users worldwide. As our business grows, so does the complexity of operating distributed systems at scale. Our mission is to proactively identify and solve the hardest reliability and performance challenges across Box’s infrastructure, working closely with product and platform teams to build resilient, scalable, and highly performant services.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Partner with product and platform engineering teams to assess service designs for scalability and performance risks, ensuring systems are built for long-term growth.
• Analyze production workloads, system metrics, and load test results to identify bottlenecks, resource inefficiencies, and architectural scaling limits.
• Design and build frameworks for load testing, capacity modeling, and performance validation that enable teams to proactively address scale concerns.
• Drive improvements in backend service efficiency, API response times, and resource utilization across Box’s globally distributed platform.
• Collaborate with SRE, infrastructure, and platform teams to optimize scaling strategies, auto-scaling policies, and resource allocation.
• Build automation and tooling that integrate performance validation into CI/CD pipelines, enabling early detection of regressions.
• Participate in root cause analysis of performance-related incidents, identify systemic issues, and drive cross-team remediation efforts.
• Contribute to the evolution of observability standards (SLIs, SLOs, latency/error budgets) that measure and guide service health.

WHO YOU ARE

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, performance engineering, or site reliability engineering, with a focus on backend systems and scalability.
• Proficient in one or more programming languages such as Go or Java, with an emphasis on building performant services.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, resource contention, and efficient system design.
• Hands-on experience analyzing and improving application and system performance across compute, storage, database, and networking layers.
• Familiarity with load testing and performance benchmarking tools (e.g., Locust, JMeter, Gatling, or custom frameworks).
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Proficient with observability tools and telemetry systems (e.g., Prometheus, Chronosphere, Grafana, Datadog, ELK).
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with a data-driven approach to diagnosing complex system behaviors.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills; comfortable partnering across engineering teams to drive reliability improvements.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Envoy) and cloud-native networking performance optimization.
• Exposure to capacity planning, cost optimization, and long-term resource forecasting in cloud environments.
• Familiarity with incident response processes, post-incident reviews, and reliability improvement practices.
• Experience contributing to internal platforms, developer tooling, or performance automation frameworks.

METHODOLOGY

• Issue tracking tool - Jira
• Knowledge repository - Confluence
• Version control system - Git

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability, and any other protected ground of discrimination under applicable human rights legislation. Box strives to respect the dignity and independence of people with disabilities and is committed to giving them the same opportunity to succeed as all other employees. Inclusiveness is core to our culture at Box, and we strive to ensure you get the most from your interview experience.

Box makes reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please complete this form . Reasonable accommodations may include scheduling adjustments, document dictation and beyond.

Notice to applicants in Los Angeles: Box, Inc and its related branches will consider for employment, qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the Los Angeles Fair Chair Ordinance. The Fair Chance Ordinance is provided here .

Notice to applicants in San Francisco: Box, Inc and its related branches will consider for employment, qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chair Ordinance. The Fair Chance Ordinance is provided here .

For details on how we protect your information when you apply, please see our Personnel Privacy Notice. If you are a California-resident, please read our California Applicant & Candidate Privacy Notice here .

NOTICE OF USE OF AI

At Box, we believe in the power of AI to improve the recruiting process while keeping people at the heart of every decision. For more information on the use of AI in our hiring process, please visit our webpage here .

Box is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. Actual base salary (or OTE if commissionable role) is dependent upon factors such as: knowledge, skill level, experience, and work location. This role is also eligible for equity and benefits. For more information, check out our benefits and perks .

By submitting this application, you understand that your personal data will be processed, stored, shared, and transferred to Box for purposes of Box’s recruitment related activities, and Box’s third-party service provider, Greenhouse Software, Inc ., engaged to help manage the recruitment and hiring process on our behalf.

Here at Box our goal is to fully leverage and engage the unique talents/capabilities of diverse teams who feel like they belong. We provide a safe space to contribute your unique skills, ideas, and insights. A welcoming space is provided to learn, try new things, grow your career, test your thinking, and evolve. Our goal to build diverse teams with broad representation that matches our customers and the world at large. We also want to make sure that you feel welcomed and supported, connected, included, and are treated fairly and with respect. We also ask that you do the same for others.