Staff Site Reliability Engineer

thrivemarket; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Thrive Market is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to define and build the reliability foundation for our platform. You’ll establish SLOs/SLIs, implement observability, and shape a scalable, self-healing system as Thrive scales rapidly on Kubernetes.

You’ll balance hands-on reliability work with strategic planning, leading incident response and contributing to platform migrations while collaborating with product engineers across AWS infrastructure.

Qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes (K8s) including cluster management and Helm charts.
• Strong Linux systems engineering background with advanced scripting.
• Proficiency in Bash, Python, Golang, Ruby, or similar languages.
• Extensive experience with AWS services (EC2, ECS/EKS, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi).
• Experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets in production.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling).
• Monitoring/observability expertise (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana).

Responsibilities

• Define, implement, and own SLOs/SLIs across critical platform services.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability systems.
• Establish error budgets and balance velocity with reliability.
• Lead incident response, blameless postmortems, and systemic improvements.
• Design chaos engineering practices to identify failure modes before impact.

Skills

Kubernetes

AWS

Observability

CI/CD

Incident response

SLOs/SLIs

Automation

Infrastructure as Code

Education

B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Datadog

Prometheus

Grafana

Terraform

CloudFormation

Kubernetes

Job description

ABOUT THRIVE MARKET

Thrive Market was founded in 2014 with a mission to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable for everyone. As an online, membership-based market, we deliver the highest quality healthy, and sustainable products at member-only prices, while matching every paid membership with a free one for someone in need. Every day, we leverage innovative technology and member-first thinking to help our over 1,700,000+ members find better products, support better brands, and build a better world in the process. We are also a Certified B Corporation, a Public Benefit Corporation, and a Climate Neutral Certified company.

Join us as we bring healthy and sustainable living to millions of Americans in the years to come.

THE ROLE

We're looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to help define and build the reliability foundation for Thrive Market's platform. You'll be working with a first-class group of engineers to establish our SRE practice from the ground up; defining SLOs, SLIs and Error Budgets, building observability into everything we do, and creating the frameworks that ensure our systems scale reliably during our company's rapid growth.

This is a high-impact role at an exciting inflection point. We've recently containerized our entire platform on Kubernetes, and we're evaluating a potential platform migration to a next-generation ecommerce platform. You'll be balancing hands-on reliability work with the strategic thinking needed to build systems that self-heal and get better over time.

If you've read books like The Google SRE Handbook, The Phoenix Project, Accelerate, The DevOps Handbook, etc., this is the right place for you!

RESPONSIBILITIES

Reliability & Observability

• Define, implement, and own Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) across critical platform services
• Build and maintain comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability systems using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar platforms
• Establish error budgets and use them to balance feature velocity with reliability investments
• Lead incident response efforts, conduct blameless postmortems, and drive systemic improvements that prevent recurrence
• Design and implement chaos engineering practices to proactively identify failure modes before they impact members

Infrastructure & Platform

• Architect and optimize our Kubernetes-based container orchestration platform for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
• Support large infrastructure migrations, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption to business operations
• Contribute to the evaluation and execution of potential platform migrations, with a focus on reliability planning and risk mitigation
• Design and implement automated deployment pipelines that enable rapid, error-free releases with feature flags and built-in rollback/roll-forward capabilities
• Develop and own disaster recovery plans, capacity planning models, and system hardening initiatives
• Collaborate closely with product engineering teams to help them scale their infrastructure in AWS and adopt SRE best practices

Culture & Process

• Help establish SRE as a practice at Thrive Market, defining the team's charter, processes, and engagement model with product engineering teams
• Champion a culture of operational excellence, continuous improvement, and data-driven reliability decisions
• Create and maintain technical documentation covering architecture decisions, runbooks, incident response procedures, and operational playbooks
• Participate in weekly on-call rotations and help build sustainable on-call practices that avoid burnout
• Identify systemic problems and inefficiencies across the engineering organization and make strategic recommendations for improvement

QUALIFICATIONS

Required

• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering, with a proven track record of improving reliability at rapidly growing companies
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes (K8s) - including cluster management, Helm charts, service meshes, and production-grade container orchestration
• Strong systems engineering background with advanced proficiency in Linux administration
• Advanced scripting and automation skills in Bash, Python, Golang, Ruby, or similar languages
• Extensive experience with core AWS services including EC2, ECS/EKS, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, Route 53, RDS, and Lambda
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar)
• Hands‑on experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets in production environments
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue‑green, canary, rolling deployments)
• Expertise in monitoring and observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, or similar)
• Strong knowledge of web application infrastructure, networking, load balancing, and secur