Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

Practice By Numbers, Inc.; Bellevue, Northern (WA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Practice By Numbers, Inc. is seeking a senior SRE to own reliability for critical services in healthcare workflows. You will design scalable distributed systems and partner with product engineering to bake reliability in from day one.

This role emphasizes software-driven reliability, blameless postmortems, and automation over manual processes. Senior engineers will mentor teammates and drive cross-team improvements toward release safety and operational readiness.

Qualifications

• Engineering degree is mandatory: BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or closely related field.
• 6+ years of experience in software engineering, SRE, infrastructure/platform engineering, or related.
• Proven experience building and operating production backend services or distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Own reliability outcomes for critical services: availability, latency, incident rate, and MTTR.
• Design and build reliable, scalable distributed systems for mission-critical healthcare workflows.
• Define and operationalize SLOs/SLIs and error budgets; drive adoption across teams.
• Lead incident response for high-severity issues; improve on-call effectiveness.
• Run blameless postmortems and ensure follow-ups are implemented.
• Write software to eliminate operational toil: automation and self-service tooling.
• Raise the bar on observability and alerting strategy; improve capacity planning.

Skills

SRE experience

Incident leadership

On-call management

Debugging complex systems

Education

Engineering degree (BS/MS CS/CE/EE)

Tools

AWS

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:

• 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 driven 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

Required

• 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

(Experience with everything isn’t required—strong fundamentals and learning velocity matter most.)

What This Role Is Not

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

This is a senior engineering role focused on software-driven reliability and platform engineering.

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.