Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability

Ironclad

San Francisco (CA)

Hybrid

USD 210,000 - 235,000

Full time

3 days ago

Be an early applicant

A complete application in a minute

Tailored resume and cover letter, ready to send.

Get past ATS filters

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Parental leave

401(k) match

Wellbeing stipend

Hybrid work

Job summary

Ironclad in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to shape the cloud platform that powers our contract lifecycle solutions. You will lead reliability initiatives, partner with engineers across teams, and drive improvements from design to production.

The role requires 8+ years in SRE, strong Kubernetes, cloud experience, and deep database know-how. You will mentor engineers, promote best practices, and help scale systems as Ironclad serves enterprise customers.

Qualifications

8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering.
2
5+ years developing and maintaining production software in TypeScript or Python, including tools and services.
3
Deep experience operating Kubernetes in production, including troubleshooting scheduling, networking, and resource issues at scale.
4
Deep hands-on experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure; GCP experience is preferred.
5
Production experience with both relational and NoSQL databases, such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Redis, including query and index tuning.
6
Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and GitOps tooling, such as Terraform or Pulumi, CircleCI, and Argo CD.
7
A strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud storage architecture, and backup and recovery.
8
Experience using AI coding tools to improve engineering workflows, with sound judgment about when to use them and how to validate their output.
9
Strong troubleshooting skills, including the ability to move from a vague symptom to a root cause under pressure.
10
Clear written and verbal communication, with design documents and incident writeups that help teams make decisions and take action.
11
A track record of leading through influence and helping teams you don’t manage adopt better practices.
12
A collaborative approach: you deliver meaningful improvements, share credit, and help others succeed.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for SRE and cloud platform.
2
Identify reliability risks and implement production changes.
3
Make architecture decisions balancing security, scale, and performance.
4
Tune and scale databases and data layer for performance.
5
Automate build, test, deploy, monitor, and recovery processes.
6
Improve SRE practices: SLOs, incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning.
7
Design backup, recovery, and disaster capabilities.
8
Participate in on-call rotation and respond to incidents.
9
Mentor engineers and review designs.
10
Collaborate with product, security, support, and customers.

Skills

SRE leadership

TypeScript / Python

Kubernetes in production

Cloud platforms (GCP/AWS/Azure)

Relational & NoSQL databases

Infrastructure as code / CI/CD

AI tooling for engineering

Troubleshooting

Documentation & incident reports

Mentorship & collaboration

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

CircleCI

Argo CD

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Redis

Job description

Build AI contracting at enterprise scale. Ship it fast.

Ironclad is building AI on one of the most consequential datasets in enterprise software: over 2 billion contracts across thousands of the world's largest organizations. Contracts run every dollar, deal, and business relationship on the planet, and the AI transformation of this space is still largely uncharted. Engineers here are building agentic solutions to problems that haven't been solved yet, in a category that's still being defined. The feedback loop is short, the data is rich, and the people closest to the work are the ones deciding what gets built next. That ability to deliver impact quickly is why the the companies at the forefront of AI choose Ironclad to manage their contracts.

We’re consistently recognized as a leader in the industry: a Leader in the Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contract Lifecycle Management, a Fortune Great Place to Work, and one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Workplaces. Ironclad has also been named to Forbes’ AI 50 and Business Insider’s list of Companies to Bet Your Career On. We’re backed by leading investors including Accel, Y Combinator, Sequoia, BOND, and Franklin Templeton. For more information, visit www.ironcladapp.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

This is a hybrid role. Office attendance is required at least twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays for collaboration and connection. There may be additional in-office days for team or company events.

We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to help shape the cloud platform that powers Ironclad. You’ll join an experienced SRE team, work across engineering to identify reliability and scaling challenges, and lead solutions from design through production.

What you’ll do

Shape our direction. Help set the technical direction for SRE and the cloud platform. Partner with teams across Ironclad to identify needs, prioritize improvements, and build a roadmap for reliability, capacity, and platform capabilities.
Solve the whole problem. Identify reliability risks before they become incidents. Design and deliver changes that reduce risk and prevent recurring failures, carrying the work through to production.
Lead architectural decisions. Make informed tradeoffs across security, scalability, and performance. Document decisions so teams can understand the reasoning and build on it.
Keep our data layer fast and reliable. Contracts live in our databases, so database reliability is business reliability. Monitor, tune, and scale our relational and NoSQL systems, addressing capacity and performance issues before they affect customers.
Reduce toil through automation. Improve how we build, test, deploy, monitor, and recover. Prioritize automation that prevents errors and makes operations repeatable.
Strengthen our SRE practices. Bring fresh perspective to SLOs, incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning. Build on what works and close the gaps.
Own resilience end to end. Design and test backup, recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities, and strengthen data durability across storage and distributed systems.
Share ownership of production reliability. Participate in the SRE on-call rotation, including coverage outside business hours. Respond to production incidents, lead complex investigations, and improve alerting, runbooks, and automation to reduce recurring incidents and on-call toil.
Help the team grow. Mentor engineers, review designs and code, and share knowledge that makes the whole team more effective.
Work across teams. Partner with product engineering, security, support, and customer-facing teams. Join customer escalations when needed and investigate issues across unfamiliar parts of the product.

What you’ll bring

8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering, including experience as a technical lead for business-critical systems.
5+ years developing and maintaining production software in TypeScript or Python, including tools and services.
Deep experience operating Kubernetes in production, including troubleshooting scheduling, networking, and resource issues at scale.
Deep hands-on experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure; GCP experience is preferred.
Production experience with both relational and NoSQL databases, such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Redis, including query and index tuning, replication, monitoring, and scaling under load.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and GitOps tooling, such as Terraform or Pulumi, CircleCI, and Argo CD.
A strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud storage architecture, and backup and recovery.
Experience using AI coding tools to improve engineering workflows, with sound judgment about when to use them and how to validate their output.
Strong troubleshooting skills, including the ability to move from a vague symptom to a root cause under pressure.
Clear written and verbal communication, with design documents and incident writeups that help teams make decisions and take action.
A track record of leading through influence and helping teams you don’t manage adopt better practices.
A collaborative approach: you deliver meaningful improvements, share credit, and help others succeed.

Helpful experience

Designing or operating multi-region systems.
Sharding databases or operating them on Kubernetes.
Running AI or LLM infrastructure in production.
Leading large-scale database, cluster, or service migrations with minimal downtime, including planning, sequencing, rollback, and stakeholder communication.
Building security into infrastructure and delivery pipelines and maintaining it through ongoing operations. FedRAMP experience is a plus.

Base Salary Range: $210,000 - $235,000 offers company bonus

The base salary range represents the minimum and maximum of the salary range for this position based at our San Francisco headquarters. The actual base salary offered for this position will depend on numerous factors, including individual proficiency, anticipated performance, and the location of the selected candidate. Our base salary is just one component of Ironclad’s competitive total rewards package, which also includes equity awards (a new hire grant, along with opportunities for additional awards throughout your tenure), competitive health and wellness benefits, and a commitment to career growth and development.

US Full-Time Employee Benefits at Ironclad:

100% health coverage for employees (medical, dental, and vision), and 75% coverage for dependents with buy-up plan options available
Market-leading leave policies, including gender-neutral parental leave and compassionate leave
Family forming support through Maven for you and your partner
Paid time off - take the time you need, when you need it
Monthly stipends for wellbeing, hybrid work, and (if applicable) cell phone use
Mental health support through Modern Health, including therapy, coaching, and digital tools
Pre-tax commuter benefits (US Employees)
401(k) plan with Fidelity with employer match (US Employees)
Regular team events to connect, recharge, and have fun
And most importantly: the opportunity to help build the company you want to work at