Senior SRE & Automation Leader

Backblaze External Website; United States; Remote; USD 178,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual company bonus program

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

401(k) program

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Backblaze is seeking a Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineer to lead the SRE organization, driving reliability, scalability, and automation across production systems.

You will hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing team, collaborate with engineering leaders, and own vulnerability management, incident response, and post-incident improvements to ensure service reliability at scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, infrastructure, or production operations, including significant engineering leadership experience.
• Proven ability to build, mentor, and develop high-performing technical teams.
• Experience leading reliability or infrastructure organizations operating large-scale, production-grade systems.
• Strong understanding of deploying and managing large fleets of Linux hosts with emphasis on automation.
• Experience with observability and monitoring technologies (e.g., VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch).
• Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, incident processes, and reliability practices at scale.
• Strong understanding of storage systems, including performance, sharding, distributed architectures, and storage algorithms.
• Knowledge of load-balancing technologies (IPVS or similar).
• Experience with security-focused infrastructure operations including patching and vulnerability remediation.
• Ability to lead major incidents and post-incident processes with RCA and corrective actions.
• Experience using automation and AI-assisted technologies to improve productivity, performance, or scalability.
• Bachelor-level or equivalent practical experience in relevant field.

Responsibilities

• Hire, lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers.
• Manage engineering managers and develop leadership capability across the organization.
• Set team goals, reliability priorities, and ensure commitments are met or expectations reset when needed.
• Collaborate with engineering leaders to define strategic priorities and execution plans.
• Develop and improve automation for deploying storage vaults, core servers, and infrastructure.
• Own vulnerability management and patching schedules to meet security requirements.
• Lead complex reliability initiatives from discovery through resolution.
• Improve observability, monitoring, and alerting to provide health insights of Backblaze infrastructure.
• Oversee SLA and reliability performance analysis and drive corrective actions.
• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to improve reliability.

Skills

SRE leadership

Automation

Observability

Monitoring

Incident management

Linux administration

Collaborative communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

Tools

VictoriaMetrics

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenSearch

IPVS

Job description

Backblaze is seeking a Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineer to lead the SRE organization, driving reliability, scalability, and automation across production systems.

You will hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing team, collaborate with engineering leaders, and own vulnerability management, incident response, and post-incident improvements to ensure service reliability at scale.