Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Nexxen; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Nexxen seeks a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to be a principal reliability partner across our infrastructure and platform teams in New York City. The role blends hands-on engineering with architectural leadership in a hybrid cloud/on‑prem environment.

You will define SLOs, drive incident postmortems, mentor SREs, and champion automation and AI-powered observability to reduce toil and improve reliability at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development and site reliability or production engineering experience.
• Experience leading reliability initiatives across multiple teams.
• Strong ability to influence without authority through data and collaboration.
• Hands-on with observability tooling and SRE best practices.

Responsibilities

• Influence application and infrastructure teams on reliability changes that matter most.
• Mentor and develop SREs at all levels and define practice standards.
• Drive Nexxen's AI strategy within SRE to strengthen observability.
• Drive latency and throughput improvements across code and infra.
• Lead architectural reliability reviews and map failure domains.
• Design reliability across hybrid on-prem and AWS infrastructure.
• Drive reliability for core data infrastructure with high throughput systems.
• Partner on infrastructure-as-code and GitOps workflows.
• Define and maintain SLIs and SLOs with observability signals.
• Lead incident postmortems and proactive failure testing.

Skills

SRE leadership

Influence without authority

Mentorship

Observability tools

Code optimization

Chaos engineering

Hybrid cloud

Linux networking

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Software Engineering

Tools

Datadog

Prometheus

Grafana

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

We're looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a principal reliability partner and technical authority across our infrastructure and platform teams, setting reliability standards and technical direction for the broader SRE practice. You'll operate across our hybrid infrastructure, on-prem and cloud, and across both the application and infrastructure layers that keep our real-time advertising platform running at scale, proactively surfacing systemic risks and driving meaningful architectural improvements while respecting each team's ownership of their own platforms.

You come from a development background and bring deep experience running reliable, high-throughput production systems at scale. Failure domains aren't just something you read about, they're something you think about constantly, and you know how to prevent them before they happen. You influence teams through technical credibility and clear communication, not authority, and the engineers you've mentored have gone on to become strong reliability practitioners. You treat every postmortem as a learning opportunity and every alert as a question waiting to be answered permanently.

This role will be based in the New York City office. Our team follows a hybrid schedule working in-office three days a week and remotely for the rest.

Each day can be different here at Nexxen, but some of the things you can expect to be doing daily are:

What You'll Do

• Influence application and infrastructure teams across the engineering org on the reliability changes that matter most, translating postmortem findings, SLO burn rates, and architectural risk signals into concrete, prioritized engineering work that teams own and execute.

• Mentor and develop SREs at every level, including senior engineers, providing structured code reviews, pairing on complex reliability investigations, and building the practice standards and career ladder that raise the reliability bar across the org.

• Help drive Nexxen's AI strategy within the SRE space, exploring and championing AI-powered tooling to strengthen proactive reliability practices and operational efficiency.

• Drive latency and throughput improvements at both the code and infrastructure level, profiling hot paths, identifying inefficient patterns, and producing specific, actionable recommendations grounded in data.

• Lead architectural reliability reviews and map failure domains across the platform, championing patterns such as circuit breakers, timeouts at every network boundary, queue-based load levelling, and graceful degradation, so failure is contained, not cascading.

• Design and validate reliability across our hybrid infrastructure, on-prem data centers and AWS, spanning compute, storage, networking, and serverless technologies, balancing redundancy and headroom against infrastructure cost.

• Drive reliability for our core data infrastructure, including high-throughput streaming and messaging systems, distributed data stores, big-data platforms, and enterprise storage systems, so these hold up under real-time, high-volume load.

• Partner with teams on infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and platform maturity, container orchestration (Kubernetes), and GitOps workflows, and automate repetitive operational work across deployment pipelines, canary releases, and rollback procedures.

• Define and maintain SLIs and SLOs, and strengthen observability across the stack using tools like Datadog, including alerting, dashboards, structured logging, and distributed tracing, so engineers have the signal they need to understand production state before, during, and after incidents.

• Lead the incident postmortem process to drive systemic fixes, and champion proactive failure testing, fault and latency injection, chaos experiments, and game days that expose weaknesses before production does.

What You’ll Bring

• 8+ years of software development and site reliability or production engineering experience, including a track record of leading reliability initiatives across multiple teams and measurably improving reliability, availability, and performance of complex distributed systems at scale.

• Proven ability to influence without authority, a history of convincing application and infrastructure teams to make difficult reliability-driven changes through technical credibility, clear data, and collaborative problem-solving rather than mandates.

• Mentorship track record: you've actively coached SREs at every level, including seniors, run structured learning initiatives, and can point to engineers whose reliability skills grew materially under your guidance.

• Strong understanding of observability practices, structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and alerting, with hands‑on experience with Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent.

• Code-level performance expertise: you can identify the hot path and prescribe targeted fixes, whether that's asynchronous I/O, smarter caching, reduced allocations, query rewriting, or connection‑pool tuning, and know when the fix belongs in the code versus the infrastructure.

• Experience with AI‑assisted observability and agentic workflows (e.g., LLM‑based coding and ops copilots, AI‑driven runbooks) to accelerate triage and root‑cause analysis.

• Deep hybrid cloud expertise, on‑prem infrastructure and AWS, including multi‑AZ and multi‑region resilience, auto‑scaling behavior under burst, and failover handling.

• Hands‑on experience with distributed, high‑throughput data infrastructure, such as streaming and messaging systems, distributed NoSQL or in‑memory data stores, big‑data or analytics platforms, and enterprise‑grade storage systems.

• A near‑obsessive interest in failure domains, you study how systems fail and maintain mental (or written) models of blast radius and cascade paths.

• Proficiency with Linux internals, network diagnostics (tcpdump, netstat, curl, traceroute), and system‑level debugging under production conditions.

• Solid SLO/SLI/error‑budget practice: you've defined them, defended them in engineering conversations, and used budget burn rates to drive prioritization decisions.

• Proficiency with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform or similar) and container orchestration (Kubernetes), and a clear‑eyed understanding of how infrastructure changes introduce reliability risk.

• Solid networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, CDN behavior, and how these layers contribute to reliability problems in distributed systems.

• Experience with chaos engineering and failure injection: you've designed and run game days, not just read about them.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
  

  In support of pay transparency and equity, the minimum and maximum full‑time annual base salary for this role is $175,000 - $225,000 the time of posting, with the potential of an incentive or bonus. While this is our reasonable expectation this is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, actual compensation is influenced by a wide range of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, education, certifications, responsibility, and geographic location. Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location. We offer a variety of benefits, including medical, dental, vision, disability insurance, 401(k), EAP, parental leave, unlimited vacation, and company‑paid holidays. The specific programs and options available will vary depending on the state, start date, and employment type. Our Talent Acquisition team will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

At Nexxen, we value our differences, varied experiences, and collective contribution. We know that not everyone takes the same career path, so if you don’t match this job description perfectly, don’t worry! We would rather see your application than risk missing out on your potential to make an impact.

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