Improve AWS production infrastructure reliability, observability, performance, and operational maturity. Build Terraform infrastructure, enhance CI/CD, automate operational work, manage incident response and on-call operations, lead postmortems, improve application resilience, support capacity planning and database reliability, and collaborate on security hardening and compliance. Mentor engineers and promote reliability practices across the organization.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Improve the reliability, performance, and operational maturity of a platform that supports the future of educational fundraising.
CONTRACT-TO-HIRE REMOTE - UNITED STATES SEATTLE / WEST COAST PREFERRED
About the role
Our client is looking for a hands-on Senior Site Reliability Engineer to improve the reliability, performance, and operational maturity of our platform. With our migration to AWS complete, this role will focus on strengthening our production environment: improving observability, automating infrastructure and operational work, enhancing incident response, and partnering with product engineers to build resilient systems. This is a high-impact role for someone who understands both infrastructure and application development. You will work across the stack, contribute code when appropriate, and help ensure our systems remain secure, scalable, and dependable as we grow.
What you'll do
• Operate, maintain, and improve our production infrastructure in AWS.
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Improve monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and service-level indicators using New Relic or comparable observability platforms.
• Reduce alert noise and build systems that identify problems before customers are affected.
• Participate in the 24/7 on-call rotation and help coordinate the response to production incidents.
• Lead blameless postmortems and ensure corrective actions result in durable improvements.
• Partner with product engineers to diagnose performance and reliability issues throughout the application stack.
• Improve application resilience through appropriate use of timeouts, retries, queuing, backpressure, and idempotency.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment practices using platforms such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI.
• Automate repetitive operational work and reduce engineering toil.
• Create and maintain runbooks, system diagrams, troubleshooting guides, and production documentation.
• Support capacity planning, performance testing, database reliability, and production-readiness reviews.
• Collaborate with Security and Engineering teams on infrastructure hardening, access controls, logging, and compliance-related operational practices.
• Mentor engineers and promote effective reliability practices across the Engineering organization
What we're looking for
• 10+ years of overall software engineering, infrastructure, or systems experience, including at least 5 years in an SRE, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or production operations role.
• Previous professional software development experience and the ability to read, debug, and contribute to application code. • Strong, hands-on experience operating production workloads in AWS. • Experience building and maintaining infrastructure with Terraform or a similar infrastructure-as-code tool.
• Strong observability skills using New Relic, Datadog, or another modern monitoring platform. • Experience with incident response, on-call operations, postmortems, and production troubleshooting.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Working knowledge of networking, Linux, distributed systems, and relational databases.
• Strong judgment when balancing immediate operational needs with long-term maintainability.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering disciplines.
• A track record of using automation to improve reliability and create leverage for other engineers.
Bonus points
• Experience with Ruby or Ruby on Rails.
• Strong PostgreSQL administration or performance-tuning experience.
• Experience operating enterprise SaaS products at scale.
• Familiarity with SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, capacity modeling, and load testing.
• Experience with payments, fintech, or other highly regulated systems.
• Experience supporting SOC 2 or similar security and compliance programs. Role details
• Contract-to-hire.
• Remote within the United States.
• Seattle-area or West Coast candidates are preferred to support occasional in-person collaboration, but exceptional candidates elsewhere should also be considered.
• Participation in a shared on-call rotation is required.
Similar Jobs
Big Data • Fintech • Information Technology • Business Intelligence • Financial Services • Cybersecurity • Big Data Analytics
Conduct red team, purple team, penetration testing, and threat emulation exercises across systems, networks, applications, and cloud environments. Identify vulnerabilities through reconnaissance, lateral movement, privilege escalation, phishing, social engineering, and adversary simulations. Develop custom scripts and tools, document findings, and communicate risks and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Top Skills:
Application SecurityBashCloud EnvironmentsComputer NetworksGitNetwork SecurityPython
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Computer Vision • Hardware • Internet of Things • Software
Manage enterprise customers after implementation by developing joint success plans, conducting executive business reviews, leading operational workshops, recommending workflow improvements, and driving value from Samsara’s IoT platform. Partner cross-functionally with Sales, Support, Sales Engineering, and Product, while mentoring Customer Success and Support teams. The role requires strong stakeholder communication, technical product knowledge, problem-solving, and up to 25% travel.
Top Skills:
Internet Of Things (Iot)SaaS
Insurance • Financial Services
Handles inbound and outbound policyholder calls to retain, resell, and recover life insurance policies. Explains coverage and premiums, recommends policy adjustments, collects delinquent payments, updates records, and follows up on solutions. The role requires empathetic communication, accurate documentation, independent judgment, and achievement of contact center KPIs. AM and PM shifts include different cancellation, recovery, payment collection, and written communication responsibilities.
Top Skills:
ExcelMS OfficeMicrosoft OutlookMicrosoft Word
What you need to know about the Colorado Tech Scene
With a business-friendly climate and research universities like CU Boulder and Colorado State, Colorado has made a name for itself as a startup ecosystem. The state boasts a skilled workforce and high quality of life thanks to its affordable housing, vibrant cultural scene and unparalleled opportunities for outdoor recreation. Colorado is also home to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, helping cement its status as a hub for renewable energy innovation.
Key Facts About Colorado Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 260,000; 8.5% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Lockheed Martin, Century Link, Comcast, BAE Systems, Level 3
- Key Industries: Software, artificial intelligence, aerospace, e-commerce, fintech, healthtech
- Funding Landscape: $4.9 billion in VC funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Access Venture Partners, Ridgeline Ventures, Techstars, Blackhorn Ventures
- Research Centers and Universities: Colorado School of Mines, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Denver, Colorado State University, Mesa Laboratory, Space Science Institute, National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Gottlieb Institute
