Senior SRE: Build Ground-Up Reliability & Observability

Forward Networks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Forward Networks in Santa Clara is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to build the SRE function for a distributed SaaS platform. You will define availability, observability, incident response, and operational excellence in collaboration with engineering, infrastructure, and product teams.

As the first SRE hire, you will shape SRE practices, implement SLOs/SLIs, champion error budgets, and drive capacity planning, chaos engineering, and production readiness reviews, with a path to leadership as

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering.
• Strong fundamentals in networking and production Kubernetes experience.
• Proficiency with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Splunk.
• Scripting in Python or Bash; infrastructure as code with Terraform/Ansible or equivalent.
• Cloud experience across AWS, GCP, or Azure; SaaS environments.
• Track record of owning incident response processes and blameless post-mortems.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive SRE practices from the ground up—SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and the frameworks the engineering org will actually use.
• Drive the reliability and operational excellence of the Forward SaaS platform.
• Build and maintain observability infrastructure—logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Lead incident response: on-call rotations, runbooks, post-mortems, and follow-through to prevent recurrence.
• Partner with engineering to embed reliability thinking into the SDLC—capacity planning, load testing, chaos engineering, and production readiness reviews.
• Help define and build the SRE team as the company scales—foundational hire with leadership potential.

Job description

Forward Networks in Santa Clara is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to build the SRE function for a distributed SaaS platform. You will define availability, observability, incident response, and operational excellence in collaboration with engineering, infrastructure, and product teams.

As the first SRE hire, you will shape SRE practices, implement SLOs/SLIs, champion error budgets, and drive capacity planning, chaos engineering, and production readiness reviews, with a path to leadership as