Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

Practice by Numbers; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Practice by Numbers is seeking a Senior SRE to own reliability of critical services in Bellevue, WA. You will design scalable distributed systems and define SLOs/SLIs while building tooling to reduce toil for engineers.

You will lead incident response, conduct blameless postmortems, and mentor peers while partnering with product engineering to bake reliability in from day one. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role requiring a strong CS/CE/EE background.

Qualifications

• Engineering degree is mandatory: BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or closely related engineering field.
• 6+ years experience in software engineering, SRE, infrastructure/platform engineering, or related.
• Strong programming skills in Go, Python, Java, or similar (production-quality code).
• Proven experience building and operating production backend services or distributed systems.
• Meaningful experience in on-call rotations, incident leadership, and post-incident improvement execution.

Responsibilities

• Own reliability outcomes for critical services: availability, latency, incident rate, and recovery time.
• Design and build reliable, scalable distributed systems that support mission-critical healthcare workflows.
• Define and operationalize SLOs/SLIs and error budgets; drive adoption across teams and use them to prioritize work.
• Lead incident response for high-severity issues; improve on-call effectiveness and reduce alert fatigue.
• Run blameless postmortems and ensure follow-ups are implemented, measured, and stick.
• Write software to eliminate operational toil: automation, self-service tooling, guardrails, and developer platforms.
• Raise the bar on observability (metrics/logs/traces), alerting strategy, and operational readiness.
• Improve resilience through capacity planning, load testing, performance tuning, and failure testing.
• Mentor engineers (SRE and product engineers) on reliability practices, debugging, and production ownership.
• Drive cross-team improvements like production readiness reviews, release safety (progressive delivery), and standard runbooks.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

SRE

Distributed systems

Education

BS/MS in CS/CE/EE or related engineering field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

GitHub Actions

Job description

This is an engineering-first Senior SRE role.

We’re looking for Senior Engineers Who Have the following:

• Built and shipped significant backend systems and/or distributed platforms
• Owned services end-to-end in production (design → launch → on-call → reliability improvements)
• Led incident response and drove durable follow-ups
• Improved reliability by writing software and changing system design—not by adding manual process

You’ll partner closely with product engineering to ensure reliability is designed in from day one, while also building the tooling and platforms that make operating services safer and easier for every engineer.

Engineers here own services end-to-end—from design to production reliability.

Important: This is not a system administrator role. We are explicitly hiring an engineering leader in reliability. Engineering degree is an absolute requirement (BS/MS in CS/CE/EE or closely related engineering field).

What You’ll Do

• Own reliability outcomes for critical services: availability, latency, incident rate, and recovery time.
• Design and build reliable, scalable distributed systems that support mission-critical healthcare workflows.
• Define and operationalize SLOs/SLIs and error budgets; drive adoption across teams and use them to prioritize work.
• Lead incident response for high-severity issues; improve on-call effectiveness and reduce alert fatigue.
• Run blameless postmortems and ensure follow-ups are implemented, measured, and stick.
• Write software to eliminate operational toil: automation, self-service tooling, guardrails, and developer platforms.
• Raise the bar on observability (metrics/logs/traces), alerting strategy, and operational readiness.
• Improve resilience through capacity planning, load testing, performance tuning, and failure testing.
• Mentor engineers (SRE and product engineers) on reliability practices, debugging, and production ownership.
• Drive cross-team improvements like production readiness reviews, release safety (progressive delivery), and standard runbooks.

What We’re Looking For

• Engineering degree is mandatory: BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related engineering field.
• 6+ years experience in software engineering, SRE, infrastructure/platform engineering, or related.
• Strong programming skills in Go, Python, Java, or similar (production-quality code).
• Proven experience building and operating production backend services or distributed systems.
• Meaningful experience in on-call rotations, incident leadership, and post-incident improvement execution.
• Strong debugging ability across complex systems: latency, saturation, cascading failures, dependency issues.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred, GCP/Azure acceptable).

Strong Signal

• You’ve owned reliability for customer-facing services with clear, measurable improvements (e.g., higher availability, lower MTTR).
• You’ve built internal platforms/tooling that made other engineers faster and reduced operational burden.
• You’ve worked in an SRE culture with SLOs, error budgets, and blameless postmortems.
• You’ve led multi-quarter reliability initiatives spanning multiple teams/services.

Technologies We Work With (Examples)

• Cloud: AWS
• Containers: Docker, Kubernetes
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
• Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions

This Role Is Not

• System administration / IT ops / helpdesk
• Manual server patching as a primary responsibility
• A “click-ops” cloud operator role

Why Join PBN

• Build and operate mission-critical healthcare infrastructure that supports real patient workflows.
• High impact: reliability work directly improves customer trust and revenue-critical operations.
• Small team with high ownership, autonomy, and ability to influence architecture.
• Strong engineering culture focused on automation, simplicity, and measurable outcomes.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $120,000 – $150,000 per year.