Staff Site Reliability Engineer, SRE

Jobtailor; California (MO); On-site; USD 120,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking an experienced SRE leader to co-found the reliability practice and drive measurable outcomes across engineering systems. You will design tooling for SLOs, error budgets, and post-incident learning, partnering with Incident Management to standardize responses.

You will transform manual toil into reusable software and establish robust production reliability architecture across hybrid cloud environments, influencing multiple teams and services.

Qualifications

• Significant experience as an SRE or Production Engineer for large-scale distributed systems.
• Hands-on in defining SLIs/SLOs and operationalizing error budgets.

Responsibilities

• Co-found the SRE practice by translating reliability charter into engineering systems and measurable outcomes.
• Design and build shared reliability tooling and automation (SLOs, readiness evidence, toil reduction).
• Establish risk-based production reliability architecture and minimum standards.
• Partner with Incident Management to operationalize severity, command, and response standards.
• Turn repetitive operational work into reusable software to protect engineering capacity.
• Help teams classify services, map dependencies, and establish meaningful SLIs/SLOs.

Skills

SRE / Production Engineering

Go / Python / Java / C++

Linux / Kubernetes / Cloud

SLIs / SLOs definition

Error budgets / on-call health

Automation / tools development

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD Tools

Observability

Hybrid Cloud

Job description

• Co-found the SRE practice by translating the reliability charter into engineering systems, adoption paths, and measurable outcomes
• Design and build shared reliability tooling and automation for service cataloging, SLOs, error budgets, readiness evidence, and toil reduction
• Establish risk-based production reliability architecture, minimum standards, golden paths, and a time-bound exception process
• Partner with Incident Management to operationalize severity, command, and response standards
• Establish blameless post-incident practices and ensure corrective actions are tracked and completed
• Help service teams classify critical services, map dependencies, identify failure modes, and establish meaningful SLIs/SLOs
• Turn repeated manual operational work into reusable software and protect engineering capacity

Requirements

• Significant experience as an SRE, Production Engineer, or Infrastructure Software Engineer operating large-scale distributed systems
• Demonstrated experience taking an SRE or operational excellence program from 0 to 1, or materially improving a program in an organization with uneven reliability maturity
• Strong software engineering ability in at least one general-purpose language (Go, Python, Java, C++, etc.)
• Deep systems knowledge across several domains: Linux, networking, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, or observability
• Practical, hands-on experience defining SLIs/SLOs, using error budgets, designing actionable alerts, and improving on-call health
• Ability to build consensus and drive adoption of standards across teams without taking away ownership of underlying services
• Sound judgment under ambiguity
• Experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, safety-relevant systems, automotive software, or another high-consequence production environment preferred
• Experience with hybrid cloud/on-premises environments and foundational platform services preferred
• Experience with data or ML platforms preferred
• Experience building service catalogs, production-readiness automation, reliability scorecards, or policy-as-code preferred
• Experience facilitating game days, failure injection, regional failover, or disaster-recovery exercises preferred

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) by establishing reliability practices, defining SLIs/SLOs, and implementing automation for operational excellence. Proficient in software engineering and systems knowledge across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and CI/CD processes.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Software Engineering (Go, Python, Java, C++)
• SLIs/SLOs Definition
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Kubernetes

Hard Skills

• Site Reliability Engineering
• Software Engineering
• SLIs/SLOs Definition
• Error Budgets
• Production Reliability Architecture
• Automation
• Service Cataloging
• CI/CD
• Observability
• Incident Management

Soft Skills

• Consensus Building
• Sound Judgment
• Collaboration

Industry Keywords

• Distributed Systems
• Operational Excellence
• High-Consequence Production Environment
• Data Platforms
• ML Platforms

Tools & Technologies

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Infrastructure
• CI/CD Tools
• Observability Tools
• Hybrid Cloud