Principal SRE

Description

The company is a specialized cloud storage provider that has grown to over $136M ARR, manages over three billion gigabytes of data for more than 500K customers in 175+ countries, and is listed on the Nasdaq after a traditional IPO in 2021.

Founded in 2007, the company grew on less than $3 million of outside funding before its 2021 listing.

This Principal SRE role protects the stability, scalability, and reliability of production systems across the core infrastructure.

You will work with cross-functional teams on the design, build, and ongoing running of that infrastructure, and act as a technical leader who engages with executives and customers.

The long-term focus is platform stability, with strong observability, process and service improvements, and use of AI and automation to resolve issues faster and keep up with customer demand.

Responsibilities

• Own the availability and durability of critical services in production, and be accountable for the results.
• Work independently and drive projects from problem discovery through to resolution.
• Help design service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, flag risks to thresholds, and work with service owners to refine SLIs and SLOs and set error budget policies and alerts.
• Take part in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
• Apply established ITIL and OSS processes for incidents, changes, problems, and capacity.
• Build automation for routine operational work to cut manual effort and toil.
• Work with engineering on overall storage design and on performance against product SLAs.
• Define monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (for example Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help connect runbooks to FireHydrant.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
• Write scripts in Bash, Python, Go, or similar to improve reliability and efficiency.
• Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations to support resilient system design and day-to-day running.
• Work with customers to set stability priorities based on how they use Backblaze products.
• Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
• Document systems, share what you learn, and help build a reliability-minded engineering culture.
• Lead cross-functional teams in finding gaps in observability and operations processes, and set overall priorities.
• Spot recurring issues, propose long-term fixes, and plan the actions needed to deliver them.
• Encourage reliability-first practices across development and operations teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations.
• Preferred: experience with hyperscalers.
• Hands-on work with large-scale, production-grade systems, including writing operational procedures and runbooks and training others on them.
• Strong Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Proven ability to use AI tools to improve platform stability and scalability.
• Knowledge of storage systems, performance, sharding, and storage algorithms.
• Experience with load balancing, including IPVS.
• Security-focused operations skills: patching, hardening, and finding vulnerabilities.
• Understanding of reliability concepts such as monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language: Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices. Comfortable working in a Kubernetes and Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces).
• Experience with HashiCorp products: Nomad, Vault, and Terraform.
• Preferred: experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
• Preferred: familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA concepts.
• Preferred: strong problem-solving skills and a willingness to learn new technologies.
• Preferred: experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure.

Conditions

The company shares pay ranges for all US-based postings, in every state.

The pay range for this position is $215,000 to $250,000 per year.

Final offers depend on factors such as candidate location, skills, depth of experience, and relevant licenses or credentials.

The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Benefits

• Family healthcare, including dental and vision.
• Competitive pay and a 401K plan.
• RSU grants for full-time employees.
• ESPP program.
• Flexible vacation policy.
• Maternity and paternity leave.
• A MacBook Pro for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation.
• Childcare bonus (human children only).
• Fertility treatment and support.
• Learning and development program.
• Commuter benefits.
• A culture that supports a healthy work-life balance.