Staff Engineer, Site Reliability Babylist · · Site Reliability $226,673–$271,991 3mo ago

Devopsroles; United States; Hybrid; USD 227,000 - 272,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Remote work stipend

Equity package

Job summary

Babylist is seeking a Staff SRE to own our AWS infrastructure and reliability practices for 9M+ users. You will evolve our AWS setup with Terraform, keep EKS and core services performant, and improve CI/CD reliability across the engineering org.

You will also support developers, define monitoring standards, lead incident responses, and contribute to platform strategy for the coming years. As a remote-first team across the U.S.

Qualifications

• Deep hands-on Terraform expertise.
• Proven AWS experience at scale (EKS, RDS, cloud networking).
• Experienced operating Kubernetes in production.
• Comfortable designing and improving CI/CD systems (CircleCI, GitHub Actions).
• Strong observability instincts (Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty, Cronitor).
• Experienced with on-call and incident management.

Responsibilities

• Infrastructure ownership—manage and evolve our AWS environment with Terraform.
• CI/CD reliability—own the speed and reliability of our CI systems for the full Engineering org.
• Developer support—unblock engineers when environments break across local, staging, and production.
• Monitoring & alerting standards—establish best practices for timely paging.
• Incident response—lead or support incident response and post-incident reviews.
• Platform strategy—contribute to architectural decisions shaping infrastructure for years ahead.

Skills

Terraform

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability

Incident management

On-call

AI tooling

Tools

CircleCI

GitHub Actions

Datadog

Sentry

PagerDuty

Cronitor

Job description

How We Build

Babylist is in the middle of a fundamental shift in how software gets made, and we are not tiptoeing into it. We are rebuilding our engineering culture around a simple belief: AI changes everything. How teams are structured, how decisions get made, how fast ideas become working software. Our engineers own problems end to end, working directly with product, design, and business partners with short feedback loops and real stakeholder access. We ship, learn, and iterate fast. When something is not working, we throw it out and start over - project failure and personal failure are not the same thing here. AI tools are as natural to our workflow as an IDE or version control. We are not exploring this, we are living it. Our engineers use AI to explore tradeoffs, pressure-test designs, and move from problem to solution in hours instead of days. They generate code with AI so they can stay focused on the decisions that actually require human judgment - not the routine ones. More velocity means more time for craft: better test coverage, stronger architecture, and deeper customer understanding. We hold ourselves to a higher quality bar because of AI, not in spite of it. We are building this playbook in real time, and we are looking for people who want to build it with us. If you have already changed how you work because of AI - or you are ready to - and you care more about shipping something great than following a prescribed process, we should talk.

Our Tech Stack

• Ruby on Rails
• AWS
• Sidekiq
• MySQL
• Redis

What the Role Is

Babylist's Platform team is the foundation every engineering team builds on - and this role is at the center of keeping it reliable, fast, and scalable. As a Staff SRE, you'll own the infrastructure and reliability practices that support 9 million+ users and the engineers who build for them. Babylist started as an e-commerce and registry platform, and we're actively growing beyond that - into health, media, mobile, and new product surfaces that don't exist yet. The Platform team is the foundation that makes all of it possible. This isn't a maintenance role - you'll be actively evolving how we build and operate AWS infrastructure, CI systems, and developer tooling. You'll work cross-functionally across all of Babylist Engineering, which means your decisions have wide leverage.

Who You Are

• Deep hands-on Terraform expertise - you own IaC, not just contribute to it
• Proven AWS experience at scale - EKS, RDS, cloud networking, DNS, CDNs, load balancers - you know the gotchas
• Experienced operating Kubernetes in production - you've debugged the hard stuff, not just deployed the easy stuff
• Comfortable designing and improving CI/CD systems - CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or similar; you care about developer velocity, not just pipeline uptime
• Strong observability instincts - Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty, Cronitor - you build alerting that's actionable, not noisy
• Experienced with on-call and incident management - you've run the post-mortems and actually changed things afterward
• Comfortable supporting developers across local, staging, and production - you're a resource, not a gatekeeper
• You naturally reach for AI in your work - at Babylist, every team uses AI daily. You're already using it to move faster and improve your output, and you stay curious about what's coming next.

How You Will Make An Impact

• Infrastructure ownership - manage and evolve our AWS environment using Terraform, keeping EKS clusters, databases, and core services current and performant
• CI/CD reliability - own the speed and reliability of our CI systems for the full Engineering org - every deploy starts here
• Developer support - be the person engineers turn to when environments break; unblock them fast across local, staging, and production
• Monitoring & alerting standards - establish and socialize best practices so the right people get paged for the right reasons
• Incident response - lead or support incident response, drive post-incident reviews, and close the loop so the same thing doesn't happen twice
• Platform strategy - contribute to architectural decisions that shape how Babylist's infrastructure evolves over the next several years

Why This Role

• Platform is the team every engineering team depends on - your work has outsized leverage across the entire product org, not just one area
• The infrastructure is solid but actively evolving - you're not inheriting chaos, you're shaping what comes next
• This is a staff-level role with real cross-team visibility - you'll influence how Babylist engineers build and ship, not just keep the lights on
• You'll work on systems that support millions of families at a high-stakes life moment - the scale is real and the product context makes the reliability work matter

About Compensation

We use a market-based approach to compensation. The starting salary range for this role is:

$226,673 to $271,991 + target 20% annual bonus and competitive equity

Your starting salary will be based on your location, experience, and qualifications, with increases over time tied to performance, role growth, and internal pay equity.

Who We Are

Babylist is the leading platform for expecting and new families. More than 10 million people shop with Babylist every year, making it the go-to destination for seamless purchasing, guidance, and expert recommendations. As a modern, AI-forward tech company, Babylist has expanded from a universal registry into a full ecosystem - the Babylist Shop, Babylist Health, Babylist Money, NYC and LA showrooms, branded content, and more - generating $750M in revenue in 2025. Building the generational brand in baby, Babylist is reshaping the $235B kids and baby market and helping parents feel confident, connected, and cared for at every step.

Our Ways of Working

Babylist is remote-first with team members across the U.S. and Canada who move fast, think smart, and use AI as part of how they work every day - not as an experiment, as an expectation. We come together twice a year to build the relationships behind the work, and we hire people who are genuinely excited about what's possible and prove it through how they show up.

Why You Will Love Working At Babylist

Our Culture

• We work with focus and intention, then step away to recharge
• We believe in exceptional management, and we invest in the tools and the time to connect with colleagues
• We build products that positively impact millions of people's lives
• AI is part of how we work, not a side experiment. You'll have leading tools like Claude and ChatGPT from day one, with no waiting on access, so the busywork gets handled and your judgment goes where it counts

Growth & Development

• Competitive pay and meaningful opportunities for career advancement
• We believe technology and data can solve hard problems
• We're committed to career progression and performance-based advancement

Benefits

• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Retirement savings plan with company matching and flexible spending accounts
• Generous paid parental leave and PTO
• Winter Wonder Week: the whole company takes a paid week off at the end of the year, whether or not you celebrate anything, so everyone's out at one and comes back refreshed
• Remote work stipend to set up your office
• Perks for physical, mental, and emotional health, parenting, childcare, and financial planning

Important Notices

Recorded Interviews. Babylist uses an interview recording tool to record and transcribe interviews for evaluation purposes in accordance with applicable privacy laws. By participating in an interview, you consent to this recording and transcription.

Interview Integrity. AI is part of how we work at Babylist - we expect you to use it too. Your application and interviews should still reflect you and your own thinking. We'll tell you when AI is encouraged. Misrepresentation at any stage may result in removal from consideration for this and future roles.

How We Review Applications. We use AI throughout our hiring process to help review, screen, and assess applications. These tools support our team's review; they do not replace it, and every hiring decision is made by a person.

Connections at Babylist. If you have a family member or close personal relationship with a current Babylist employee, please let your recruiter know. This helps us keep our process fair and transparent for everyone.