Staff Software Engineer, Reliability Seattle, Washington, United States

Metropolis; Seattle, Northern (WA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Metropolis is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on Reliability to own reliability across the entire platform. You will drive failover strategies, chaos engineering, and observability improvements to sustain 99.9%+ uptime as we scale to new markets.

You will join the Product Foundations team and tackle external service failover, database replication, and disaster recovery planning while influencing architecture decisions and establishing company-wide reliability standards.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience in software or reliability-focused roles.
• Expert-level reliability engineering skills including multi-region architectures and disaster recovery.
• Experience implementing monitoring, alerting, tracing, and logging at scale (Datadog preferred).
• Ability to design resilient distributed systems with strong systems thinking.

Responsibilities

• Own the overall reliability posture for the Metropolis platform and establish metrics, systems, and practices for 99.9%+ uptime.

Skills

Reliability engineering

SRE practices

Production observability

Multi-region architectures

Tools

Datadog

Job description

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