About Upstart
Upstart is the leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than 80% of borrowers are approved instantly, with zero documentation to upload.
Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.
Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!
The Team
Upstart’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team owns the reliability, resiliency, and observability of Upstart’s production systems. We build automation, tooling, and frameworks to ensure our infrastructure is healthy, scalable, and able to support a seamless experience for both engineers and customers. Our scope includes defining Upstart’s technology operations risk strategy, implementing disaster recovery planning, and setting company-wide reliability standards.
As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Upstart, you will serve as a thought leader and SRE evangelist - driving adoption of best practices, mentoring engineers across the organization, and influencing both technical and business decisions. Your impact will extend beyond SRE into cross-functional collaboration with Product Engineering, DevEx, Development Productivity (Quality), DevOps, Data Engineering, and Machine Learning teams to elevate operational excellence across the company.
How you’ll make an impact:
- Lead the definition, advocacy, and adoption of SRE principles across engineering teams
- Partner with leadership to shape long-term reliability, resiliency, and observability strategies
- Champion distributed tracing, real user monitoring (RUM), and key performance metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) to improve system visibility and user experience
- Build and scale self-healing systems to minimize manual intervention and reduce downtime
- Drive enterprise-wide improvements to incident response processes, including those related to Machine Learning systems
- Collaborate closely with Development Productivity and Quality teams to improve engineering velocity without sacrificing reliability
- Influence technical and operational roadmaps through data-driven insights and hands-on technical contributions
- Own and deliver cross-functional initiatives from concept through execution, applying program management skills to align stakeholders and achieve results
What we’re looking for:
- Minimum requirements:
- 10+ years combined experience across Software Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering, with a balanced background in both disciplines
- Proven track record as an SRE thought leader and evangelist, driving adoption of reliability best practices across organizations
- Strong communication and mentoring skills to influence engineers across disciplines
- Proficiency in Python, Go, and JavaScript/TypeScript
- Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation, etc.)
- Experience building internal tooling from scratch in agile development environments
- Expertise with observability, distributed tracing, RUM, LCP, and performance monitoring tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus)
- Experience with on-call and incident management, including large-scale or ML-related incidents
- Strong background in automation and building self-healing systems
- Hands-on experience with LLM/GenAI to improve SRE efficiency and processes
- Program management skills, including the ability to propose innovative solutions, influence leadership, improve processes, and drive cross-functional projects to completion
- Preferred qualifications:
- Experience with service mesh
- Full stack development skills
- Experience building or extending observability platforms
- Background in Development Productivity or Quality Platforms
- Experience in high-scale SaaS, microservice-oriented cloud environments
Position Location - This role is available in the following locations: Remote, San Mateo, Columbus, Austin
Time Zone Requirements - This team operates across all U.S. time zones.
Travel Requirements - This team has regular on-site collaboration sessions. These occur 3 days per quarter at an Upstart office. If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel related expenses.
What you'll love:
- Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart
- 401(k) with 100% company match up to $4,500 and immediate vesting and after-tax savings
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
- Life and disability insurance
- Generous holiday, vacation, sick and safety leave
- Supportive parental, family care, and military leave programs
- Annual wellness, technology & ergonomic reimbursement programs
- Social activities including team events and onsites, all-company updates, employee resource groups (ERGs), and other interest groups such as book clubs, fitness, investing, and volunteering
- Catered lunches + snacks & drinks when working in offices
#LI-REMOTE
#LI-MidSenior
At Upstart, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. The anticipated base salary for this position is expected to be within the below range. Your actual base pay will depend on your geographic location–with our “digital first” philosophy, Upstart uses compensation regions that vary depending on location. Individual pay is also determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
In addition, Upstart provides employees with target bonuses, equity compensation, and generous benefits packages (including medical, dental, vision, and 401k).
Upstart is a proud Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to ensuring that underrepresented classes receive better access to affordable credit, and are just as committed to embracing diversity and inclusion in our hiring practices. We celebrate all cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, and know that we can only become better together.
If you require reasonable accommodation in completing an application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please email [email protected]
https://www.upstart.com/candidate_privacy_policy
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