Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Ethos Life; United States; Remote; USD 156,000 - 275,000; Full time

Job summary

Ethos Life is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to guide reliability and scale across production systems on AWS, Kubernetes, and our AI platform. You will shape technical direction, design cross-team solutions, and partner with SRE leadership in the US and Bangalore to raise the reliability bar.

You will own SLI/SLO frameworks, incident post-mortems, capacity planning, and cost-aware infrastructure, building scalable tooling and governance for AI gateways, data connectors, and cloud

Qualifications

• 10+ years of full-time software engineering, with production systems at scale.
• Staff-level impact leading cross-team infrastructure or reliability initiatives.
• Strong coding in Golang, Python, or TypeScript and best practices.
• Deep AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform experience; Kubernetes operators a plus.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, PostgreSQL, CI/CD, and observability.
• Experience implementing SLIs/SLOs, incident response, and post-mortems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to influence broadly.
• Desire to remove toil while balancing reliability, velocity, and cost.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-quarter reliability strategy for infrastructure and platform tooling.
• Architect complex cross-cutting systems and review specs for resilience.
• Mentor SREs across US and Bangalore; participate in interviews.
• Establish SLI/SLO frameworks, error budgets, and monitoring strategies.
• Lead incident response and blameless post-mortems to reduce recurrence.
• Oversee capacity planning, DR, and failure-mode testing to improve resilience.
• Design scalable AWS/Kubernetes-based infrastructure and internal tooling.
• Govern AI gateways, model routing governance, and secure data connectors.
• Drive FinOps; optimize cloud spend and cost attribution; build cost-aware routing.

Skills

Golang

Python

TypeScript

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

PostgreSQL

CI/CD

DataDog

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

DataDog

Job description

Ethos (Nasdaq: $LIFE) is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.

About the role

Ethos is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a technical leader for our SRE organization in the US. In this role, you will help set the technical direction for how Ethos builds, runs, and scales production systems, from our core AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure to the internal platforms and toolchains that power our AI initiatives.

This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with organization-wide scope. You will design and build critical infrastructure yourself, lead cross-team initiatives from conception to delivery, and raise the reliability bar across engineering by partnering closely with product teams, up to and including submitting PRs to their codebases. You will work alongside SRE leadership in the US and Bangalore to shape the roadmap, and you will be a go-to technical authority for reliability, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Set Direction: Define and drive the multi-quarter technical strategy for reliability, infrastructure, and platform tooling, in partnership with SRE and engineering leadership and aligned with company OKRs.
• Architecture: Lead the design of complex, cross-cutting infrastructure systems. Author and review technical specifications and architecture proposals to ensure consistency, resilience, and long-term maintainability.
• Influence Without Authority: Motivate product engineering teams to adopt reliability best practices, and act as a trusted advisor on production readiness when new services are designed and brought online.
• Mentorship: Grow the technical skills of SREs across our US and Bangalore teams through design reviews, pairing, and code review, and help raise the hiring bar by participating in interviews.

Reliability & Performance Engineering

• Service Standards: Establish the framework for how teams define, measure, and act on SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets. Help teams instrument and monitor them.
• Incident Excellence: Serve as a senior technical leader during high-severity incidents. Drive a culture of rigorous, blameless post-mortems and ensure follow-up work actually reduces recurrence.
• Resilience: Lead capacity planning, disaster recovery, and failure-mode testing so our systems degrade gracefully and recover quickly.
• Observability: Evolve our monitoring and alerting strategy so failures are detected before they impact customers and on-call is sustainable.

Infrastructure & AI Platform Tooling

• Scalable Systems: Design, build, and operate our AWS cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Kubernetes, and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Atlantis).
• AI Gateway & Governance: Architect and build governed gateways for AI model routing, including model access controls, audit trails, and secure data connectors (such as MCP) that prevent sensitive data exposure.
• Security & Compliance: Ensure infrastructure, including AI prototyping environments, meets security and regulatory requirements through automated scanning, PII guardrails, and scoped data access.
• FinOps: Lead initiatives to optimize cloud spend across the organization, including right-sizing, spot instance utilization, and cost attribution.
• AI Cost Management: Design metering and budgeting for LLM token usage, and build cost-aware routing so workloads use the most efficient model for the job.
• Visibility: Establish clear cost metrics and partner with engineering teams on architectures that are both performant and cost-effective.
• Paved Roads: Build internal tools, CI/CD pipelines, and self-service platforms that make the reliable path the easy path for product engineering teams.
• Toil Elimination: Identify systemic sources of toil across engineering and automate them away.

Qualifications and Skills:

• Experience: 10+ years of full-time software engineering experience in relevant roles (SRE, Infrastructure, Platform, DevOps, or Backend SWE), including significant time operating production systems at scale.
• Staff-Level Impact: A track record of leading complex, multi-team infrastructure or reliability initiatives from ambiguity to delivery, and of influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team.
• Software Engineering: Strong coding skills in Golang, Python, or TypeScript, and a commitment to engineering best practices: design patterns, code reviews, and testing.
• Cloud & Platform Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform. Experience building Kubernetes operators is a plus.
• Systems Knowledge: Strong understanding of distributed systems, PostgreSQL, CI/CD systems, and observability tooling such as DataDog.
• Reliability Practice: Hands-on experience implementing SLIs/SLOs, leading incident response, and running effective post-mortems.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication. You can write a clear design doc, explain trade-offs to executives, and build consensus across teams.
• Mindset: A strong desire to remove toil from systems, and the judgment to balance reliability, velocity, and cost.

Nice to Have

• Experience building or operating LLM toolchains, such as AI gateways, model routing (e.g., Bedrock, Anthropic), and governance frameworks, including PII scanning and audit trails for model interactions.
• Demonstrated experience leading cloud cost optimization or building usage metering systems.
• Experience in regulated industries (insurance, fintech, healthcare) or with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2.
• Experience collaborating with globally distributed teams.
• Languages: TypeScript, Golang, Python
• Observability & Tools: DataDog, GitHub Actions, PostgreSQL

The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $156,000 - $275,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only and do not include applicable bonus, equity, or benefits.

You can find further details of our US benefits at https://www.ethoslife.com/careers/

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. At Ethos we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the SF Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrests and conviction records.