Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, and they are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of their services and infrastructure. The role involves building automation, maintaining observability, and supporting incident response to optimize customer-facing systems.

Responsibilities:

• Own and drive the availability, durability, and performance of critical services across all production environments
• Lead and champion complex projects from problem discovery through complete, cross-functional resolution, demonstrating high-level technical ownership
• Define, establish, and enforce service health standards, including working with engineering leadership to implement SLIs, SLOs, and error budget policies for multiple services
• Lead critical incident response and post-incident reviews, translating findings into strategic, long-term service improvements and architectural changes
• Mentor others and act as a subject matter expert in following and evolving established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management)
• Design and architect scalable automation solutions to eliminate toil and improve the efficiency of operational tasks across the entire platform
• Drive the strategic direction of monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and integrate them for comprehensive observability
• Build, maintain, and secure advanced CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and complex infrastructure as code solutions (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins)
• Write production-grade code (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to develop new reliability tools and enhance existing systems
• Act as a principal partner to engineering, product, and operations teams, consulting on resilient system design, architecture, and operation
• Lead and formalize the Production Readiness Review (PRR) process, ensuring robust operational handoff for all new services and features
• Lead capacity planning and disaster recovery strategy across critical infrastructure components
• Manage the relationship with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot systemic issues and ensure strict adherence to SLA performance
• Drive the creation of high-quality documentation, proactively share advanced learnings, and cultivate a reliability-first engineering culture across teams
• Own the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of operational playbooks, runbooks, and detailed system documentation
• Proactively identify systemic, recurring issues and architect and drive the implementation of long-term improvements and strategic design action plans
• Be a leading voice in promoting and embedding reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• 8+ years of progressive experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations
• Extensive experience designing, scaling, and operating large-scale, production-grade distributed systems
• Expert-level Linux systems administration and advanced troubleshooting skills
• Lead security-minded operations, focusing on system-wide patching, hardening, and proactive vulnerability identification
• Deep mastery of service reliability concepts, including advanced monitoring, complex alerting strategy, leading incident response, and in-depth root cause analysis
• Advanced proficiency in at least one modern scripting/programming language (Python or Go strongly preferred)
• Expert knowledge of incident response methodologies and operational best practices
• Proven experience designing and operating container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts required
• Expert experience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform) in a production environment
• Significant experience in a SaaS, service provider, or hyper-scale distributed systems environment
• Deep familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and experience defining/enforcing SLO/SLA's
• Exceptional problem-solving skills and a strong drive to learn and apply new, complex technologies
• Advanced experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) in a production setting