Senior Staff Production Engineering Lead

Ridgeline; San Ramon (CA); Hybrid; USD 235,000 - 295,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited vacation

Educational reimbursements

$0 cost employee insurance plans

Job summary

Ridgeline is seeking a Senior Staff Production Engineering Lead to enhance operational maturity and delivery standards across the engineering organization. In this role, you will collaborate closely with SRE and product engineering teams to ensure safer and more reliable software deployments.

The ideal candidate has over 12 years of experience in Production Engineering and a deep understanding of cloud-native environments. Competitive compensation includes a targeted salary of $235,000–$295,000, along with rich benefits.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in Production Engineering or related fields.
• Deep expertise operating and scaling distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of software delivery and change management.

Responsibilities

• Define progressive delivery and rollout standards.
• Improve deployment safety and change reliability.
• Standardize deployment verification and rollback patterns.

Skills

Production Engineering

Site Reliability Engineering

Cloud-native environments

Deployment strategies

Programming (Go, Python)

Kubernetes

CI/CD systems

Observability platforms

Leadership

Communication

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD systems

Observability platforms

Job description

Senior Staff Production Engineering Lead

San Ramon, CA | Reno, NV | New York, NY

Life at Ridgeline

At Ridgeline, how we work matters as much as what we build. Ridgeliners act like owners, choose growth over comfort, communicate with transparency. We assume positive intent, bias toward action, bring solutions—not just problems. We celebrate wins, learn from setbacks, and thrive in a resilient, collaborative, high‑performing culture. If this excites you, we'd love to meet you.

The Role

As a Senior Staff Production Engineering Lead at Ridgeline, you will drive operational maturity around production change across the engineering organization. Your work will establish the standards, tooling, and practices that make deployments safer, more predictable, and more observable. You will partner closely with SRE, Engineering Operations, and product engineering teams to evolve production engineering capabilities, progressive delivery strategies, and operational readiness practices across the company.

This is a highly influential technical leadership role focused on balancing engineering velocity with operational reliability. You will help define how software changes are introduced, validated, and managed in production while reducing operational risk and improving deployment confidence. Leveraging modern cloud‑native technologies and AI‑assisted engineering tools, you will help Ridgeline continuously improve how software reaches production while minimizing complexity and operational burden.

You must be work authorized in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship.

Impact you will have

• Define progressive delivery and rollout standards
• Improve deployment safety and change reliability
• Establish release operating principles and risk models
• Standardize deployment verification and rollback patterns
• Rationalize feature flag and data deployment practices
• Partner with SRE to evolve release tooling and automation
• Coach teams on deployment discipline and operational readiness
• Analyze deployment failures and drive systemic improvements

What we look for

• 12+ years of experience in Production Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, or related disciplines, including experience leading organization‑wide operational excellence initiatives
• Deep expertise operating and scaling distributed systems in cloud‑native environments
• Strong understanding of software delivery, production change management, and progressive delivery practices
• Experience designing and implementing deployment strategies such as canary, blue‑green, and rolling deployments
• Strong programming and automation skills in languages such as Go, Python, or similar
• Expertise with Kubernetes, CI/CD systems, observability platforms, and modern software delivery practices
• Proven ability to influence engineering organizations and drive adoption of technical standards through leadership and collaboration
• Strong systems thinking, operational judgment, and problem‑solving skills
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively across teams
• Serious interest in having fun at work

Compensation and Benefits

The cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $235,000 – $295,000. Final compensation amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amount listed above.

As an employee at Ridgeline, you’ll have many opportunities for advancement in your career and can make a true impact on the product.

In addition to the base salary, Ridgeline employees can participate in our Company Stock Plan subject to the applicable Stock Option Agreement. We also offer rich benefits that reflect the kind of organization we want to be: unlimited vacation, educational and wellness reimbursements, and $0 cost employee insurance plans.

Ridgeline is proud to be a community‑minded, discrimination‑free equal opportunity workplace.

Ridgeline processes the information you submit in connection with your application in accordance with the Ridgeline Applicant Privacy Statement. Please review the Ridgeline Applicant Privacy Statement in full to understand our privacy practices and contact us with any questions.

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