Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Finalsite; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Finalsite is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to own platform reliability for the Composer CMS and drive platform-wide standards in a GCP-primary, multi-cloud setup.

You will mentor engineers, build self-serve tooling, and champion change and disaster recovery planning to ensure highly available systems.

Qualifications

• Expert-level knowledge of GCP and overall infrastructure.
• Proficient in IaC with Terraform/Terragrunt.
• Experience designing and operating CI/CD with GitLab or similar.

Responsibilities

• Own cloud architecture strategy for scalable, reliable platforms.
• Lead Kubernetes health and workloads at scale.
• Shape network, edge, and global routing strategies.

Skills

GCP architecture

Kubernetes & containers

Infrastructure as Code

CI/CD pipelines

Observability & SRE practices

Security-first engineering

Cost optimization

Code literacy (Ruby, Java, Python)

Tools

Terraform

Terragrunt

GitLab CI/CD

Job description

WHO WE ARE

Finalsite is the most valued partner for K–12 schools to build trust, strengthen community, and grow enrollment. Ranked among the best EdTech Companies in America, Finalsite supports more than 7,000 schools and districts worldwide with an integrated platform for websites, communications, mobile apps, enrollment, and marketing services.

Headquartered in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Finalsite is a global company with employees working remotely across nearly every U.S. state, as well as throughout Europe, South America, and Asia.

We believe people do their best work when they feel supported, connected, and empowered to grow. That’s why we invest in our employees through competitive benefits, professional development opportunities, and a collaborative culture built on partnership and purpose. Whether you’re looking to expand your skills, take on new challenges, or make a meaningful impact in education, Finalsite offers the opportunity to grow your career while helping schools thrive.

At Finalsite, every interaction matters — with our clients, with each other, and with the schools and families we serve. Join us and help shape stronger school communities around the world

SUMMARY

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you'll focus on the platform behind Finalsite's Composer CMS, while also working cross-team to shape platform-wide standards and integrations. You'll help set the technical direction for how we build, scale, and operate our platform in a GCP-primary, multi-cloud environment. You'll be the person other engineers come to when a system needs to be rethought, not just repaired, and you'll play a key role in growing the senior engineers around you. This is a role for someone who wants to know exactly how the systems work, how they will fail, and how to build the guardrails that keep everyone else from finding out the hard way.

LOCATION

100% Remote - Anywhere within the US

WHAT WE LOOK FOR

• Cloud Architecture & Scalability. You guide our cloud architecture strategy with a focus on scalability, maintainability, and cost efficiency, and you lead capacity planning so we scale ahead of demand instead of reacting to it.
• Kubernetes & Container Platform Ownership. You own the health of our Kubernetes (GKE) platform, from cluster architecture to workload reliability at scale.
• Network & Edge Architecture. You design and evolve our network architecture, including global routing, connectivity, and edge strategy with Cloudflare.
• Infrastructure as Code. You drive IaC standards across the team, building reusable Terraform/Terragrunt modules that other teams can adopt without reinventing them.
• Observability Mindset. You build and mature our observability practice, defining what we monitor, how we alert, and how we define and hold ourselves to SLOs.
• Focus on Reliability. You lead disaster recovery planning for the platforms you own, including backup design, failover planning, and clear recovery objectives (RTO/RPO), and you architect highly available, fault-tolerant systems.
• Security-First Engineering. You bring a security-first mindset to everything you build, treating it as a design input from day one, not a review gate at the end.
• Cost Optimization. You keep a close eye on cloud cost and help teams make smart tradeoffs between performance, resilience, and spend.
• Code Literacy. You can read, understand, and write basic code when needed, across languages and runtimes such as Ruby/Rails, Java, Python, for example. You're comfortable in application code to spot reliability, performance, or architecture issues.

HOW YOU'LL WORK

• Team First. You mentor senior engineers, helping them grow their technical judgment and take on bigger calls of their own.
• Developer Enablement. You build tools and patterns that let other teams move independently, turning one-off solutions into lasting, self-serve practice, so SRE isn't the bottleneck standing between people and the answer.
• Collaborative Planning. You represent infrastructure and reliability concerns in planning conversations, weighing in early enough to shape decisions, not just implement them.
• Change Management. You champion strong change management practices, including peer review, staged rollouts, and go/no-go gates for high-risk changes.
• Incident Response. You lead response for high-severity incidents, participate in our on-call rotation, and turn every incident into a lasting improvement.

WE'D LIKE YOU TO HAVE

• GCP & Infrastructure Expertise. Expert-level knowledge of GCP and infrastructure broadly, comfortable operating across the full stack rather than one layer of it.
• Infrastructure as Code. Expertise in IaC, including Terraform and Terragrunt.
• CI/CD Pipelines. Experience with GitLab (or similar) and CI/CD pipeline design and operation.