Staff Software Engineer, Reliability

Metropolis Technologies; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 204,000 - 249,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Bonus plans

Healthcare benefits

401(k) plan

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Job summary

Metropolis Technologies is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on Reliability to own reliability across the Metropolis platform and drive practices ensuring 99.9%+ uptime as we scale to new markets. You will join the Product Foundations team and build the foundational infrastructure powering mobility commerce.

You’ll design failover systems, implement chaos engineering, and enhance our observability foundation.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience at scale.
• Expert-level reliability engineering with multi-region architectures and failover automation.
• Observability expertise with monitoring/alerting/tracing at scale (Datadog or similar).
• Systems thinking to design resilient distributed systems.
• Knowledge of replication, backup/restore, and NoSQL/SQL databases.
• Production AWS experience with multi-region deployments and DNS failover.
• Experience with AI-powered development tools and context engineering.
• Strong technical communication and cross-team influence.
• Proficiency in Java and/or Scala, JVM performance and concurrency.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability posture and 99.9%+ uptime across services.
• Design automatic failover for external dependencies (Twilio, Stripe) with circuit breakers.
• Architect regional deployment strategies with DB replication and DNS-based traffic routing.
• Establish comprehensive monitoring with Datadog (APM, logs, metrics).
• Implement synthetic monitoring, SLO-based alerts, on-call rotation, and health dashboards.
• Own incident management: workflows, post-mortems, runbooks, MTTR reduction.
• Advance resilience patterns across services: health checks, graceful degradation, feature flags.
• Build and maintain local mirrors for dependencies, including caching and security scans.

Skills

Reliability engineering

Multi-region architectures

Circuit breakers

Chaos engineering

Datadog monitoring

Observability

Java/Scala

JVM performance

AWS cloud

DNS failover

Incident management

MTTR reduction

Product Foundations

AI tooling context engineering

Tools

Datadog

Chaos Monkey

Gremlin

GitHub Copilot

GitHub

Job description

Who We Are

The real world is the next frontier, and at Metropolis, we are creating the artificial intelligence to make it responsive. We are pioneering the Recognition Economy — a future where mundane repetition disappears and being known unlocks access, comfort, and belonging everywhere you go. From transforming parking into a seamless drive-in, drive-out experience for millions of Members to expanding our intelligence layer across retail and hospitality, we are building a world that feels instinctive and magical. The future isn’t coming; it’s here, and we need builders, innovators, and problem solvers to help us create it.

Who We Are

The real world is the next frontier, and at Metropolis, we are creating the artificial intelligence to make it responsive. We are pioneering the Recognition Economy — a future where mundane repetition disappears and being known unlocks access, comfort, and belonging everywhere you go. From transforming parking into a seamless drive-in, drive-out experience for millions of Members to expanding our intelligence layer across retail and hospitality, we are building a world that feels instinctive and magical. The future isn’t coming; it’s here, and we need builders, innovators, and problem solvers to help us create it.

Who You Are

Metropolis is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on Reliability to own reliability across the entire Metropolis platform and drive the comprehensive practices that ensure system availability, resilience, and observability for our mission‑critical mobility infrastructure. In this role, you will build reliability from first principles, architecting failover systems, implementing chaos engineering, and improving our observability foundation to maintain 99.9%+ uptime as we scale to new markets.

As the technical owner of our reliability posture, you will tackle challenges like external service failover, dependency mirroring, and database replication, working alongside highly technical teams across the organization to influence architecture decisions and establish company‑wide reliability standards. You will join the Product Foundations team, playing a key role in building the foundational infrastructure that powers the future of mobility commerce.

What You'll Do

• Own the overall reliability posture for the Metropolis platform, establishing practices, metrics, and systems that ensure 99.9%+ uptime across all services
• Design and implement automatic failover mechanisms for critical external dependencies like Twilio for SMS/voice and Stripe for payments with circuit breakers, retry policies, and degraded mode operations
• Architect and build active-passive or active-active regional deployment strategies with database replication, automated failover, and DNS‑based traffic routing including disaster recovery planning and testing
• Establish comprehensive monitoring using Datadog for APM, logs, and metrics correlation
• Implement synthetic monitoring, SLO‑based alerting, on‑call rotation, and escalation policies while building service health dashboards that show customer impact
• Own the incident management process including workflows, tooling, post‑mortem culture, runbook automation, and MTTR reduction initiatives to drive down mean time to recovery from detection to resolution
• Drive adoption of resilience patterns across all services including health checks, graceful degradation, feature flags, rate limiting, backpressure mechanisms, and chaos engineering practices
• Build and maintain local mirrors for critical dependencies with artifact caching, dependency pinning, and vulnerability scanning to prevent build failures from upstream outages

What we're looking for

• 8+ years of engineering experience including software engineering, reliability engineering, SRE practices, or production operations at scale
• Demonstrate expert‑level reliability engineering skills including hands‑on experience with multi‑region architectures, failover automation, circuit breakers, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery
• Utilize production observability expertise with deep experience implementing monitoring, alerting, tracing, and logging systems at scale – specifically Datadog or similar APM platforms in high‑load environments
• Apply strong systems thinking with proven ability to design resilient distributed systems that gracefully handle failures, network partitions, and external dependency outages
• Demonstrate database and data systems knowledge including replication strategies, backup/restore procedures, connection pooling, query optimization, and experience with both relational and NoSQL databases
• Leverage cloud platform expertise with production experience operating and ensuring reliability of systems on AWS including multi‑region deployments, load balancing, and DNS‑based failover
• Possess experience with AI‑powered development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar agentic coding tools for enhanced productivity – context engineering in particular
• Exhibit excellent technical communication with ability to influence technical decisions across teams, document complex systems, conduct post‑mortems, and establish reliability standards organization‑wide
• Demonstrate expert‑level Java and/or Scala proficiency with strong understanding of JVM performance, concurrency, and operational characteristics

While not required, these are a plus

• Bring Scala experience
• Possess SRE or Reliability Engineering experience at companies known for operational excellence such as Google, Amazon, Netflix or high‑growth startups where you built reliability practices from the ground up
• Demonstrate incident response leadership including experience building incident management processes, conducting blameless post‑mortems, and driving MTTR reduction initiatives in production environments
• Utilize chaos engineering experience with tools like Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, or similar, including designing and executing game days and failure injection testing
• Exhibit performance optimization experience with profiling, benchmarking, capacity planning, and system tuning at hyperscale including experience optimizing for high‑throughput, low‑latency systems
• Show open source contributions or technical blog writing that demonstrates depth of expertise in reliability engineering, distributed systems, or production operations

Our Stack

• Languages + Frameworks: TypeScript, React, Scala (principally), Java (limited)
• Datastores: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Snowflake
• Cloud: AWS
• Version control: Git & GitHub
• AI Tooling: Copilot on GitHub
• Observability: Datadog

4 Days in Office:

Metropolis values in‑person collaboration to drive innovation, strengthen culture, and enhance the Member experience. Our corporate team members hold to our office‑first model, which requires employees to be on‑site at least four days a week, fostering organic interactions that spark creativity and connection

When you join Metropolis, you’ll join a team of world‑class product leaders and engineers, building an ecosystem of technologies at the intersection of parking, mobility, and real estate. Our goal is to build an inclusive culture where everyone has a voice and the best idea wins. You will play a key role in building and maintaining this culture as our organization grows. The anticipated base salary for this position is $203,500 USD to $248,500 USD annually. The actual base salary offered is determined by a number of variables, including, as appropriate, the applicant’s qualifications for the position, years of relevant experience, distinctive skills, level of education attained, certifications or other professional licenses held, and the location of residence and/or place of employment. Base salary is one component of Metropolis’ total compensation package, which may also include access to or eligibility for healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, short‑term and long‑term disability coverage, basic life insurance, a lucrative stock option plan, bonus plans, and more.

Metropolis may utilize an automated employment decision tool (AEDT) to assess or evaluate your candidacy for employment or promotion. AEDTs are used to assist in assessing a candidate’s application relative to the required job qualifications and responsibilities listed in the job posting.

As part of this process, Metropolis retains data relevant to your candidacy, including personal information, for a period that is reasonably necessary for the use of the tool. If you are hired for the position, your data may become part of your employee records.

Metropolis Technologies is an equal opportunity employer. We make all hiring decisions based on merit, qualifications, and business needs — without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under federal, state, or local law.

We are committed to providing a welcoming, accessible hiring experience. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application or interview process, please reach out to us at [e-mail].