Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

Practice By Numbers, Inc.; Redmond (WA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

High impact work on healthcare infrastructure

Strong engineering culture focused on automation

Small team with high ownership and autonomy

Job summary

A leading healthcare technology firm is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to enhance operational reliability of their systems. You will own critical service outcomes and lead incident responses while developing distributed systems to support healthcare workflows. This senior engineering role emphasizes software-driven reliability, requiring a strong educational background and significant experience in software engineering. You’ll work in a highly autonomous team contributing to mission-critical infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering or SRE.
• Strong programming skills in Go, Python, or Java.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.

Responsibilities

• Own reliability outcomes for critical services.
• Design and build reliable, scalable distributed systems.
• Lead incident response for high-severity issues.

Skills

Programming in Go

Programming in Python

Incident leadership

Debugging complex systems

Cloud infrastructure (AWS)

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

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

To be explicit, 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.