Site Reliability Engineer

Description

The company runs a fundraising platform for non-profit colleges, universities and K-12 schools, with more than 1,300 institutions on it and millions of donors giving through it.

At its current pace, the company expects to handle $100 billion in charitable giving over the next decade.

Backed by Y Combinator, the company has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies for five years running and has been profitable in nine of the last ten years.

In 2025 the company closed a $140 million growth investment, which included a liquidity event for employees, its second in under three years.

The team has over 130 people across more than 30 states and is growing to support a planned $100 million investment in AI product development.

The company is still small compared with what it is going after, so each hire has a real effect on what comes next.

The role centres on keeping the production platform reliable, fast and easier to operate now that the move to AWS is finished.

Responsibilities

• Run, maintain and improve the production infrastructure in AWS.
• Write and upkeep infrastructure as code in Terraform.
• Help keep workloads on Kubernetes and Amazon EKS running well.
• Make dashboards, alerts and service-level indicators more useful in New Relic or a comparable observability tool.
• Trace production problems to their root causes and put lasting fixes in place.
• Take a turn in the shared 24/7 on-call rotation and help the team respond to incidents well.
• Join blameless postmortems and finish the follow-up work that makes repeat incidents less likely or less damaging.
• Work with product engineers on performance and reliability problems anywhere in the stack.
• Make the system more resilient with proven patterns such as timeouts, retries, queuing, backpressure and idempotency.
• Keep CI/CD pipelines and deploy workflows working and improve them, using tools like GitHub Actions and CircleCI.
• Script away repetitive operational chores and find ways to cut engineering toil.
• Write and keep current runbooks, system diagrams, troubleshooting guides and production docs.
• Help with capacity planning, performance testing, database reliability and production-readiness reviews.
• Bring established security, access-control, logging and compliance practices into infrastructure work.
• Take small to medium reliability projects from design and task breakdown through to delivery.
• Share progress, risks, tradeoffs and blockers clearly, and act on feedback from engineering colleagues.

Requirements

• About 5+ years of related experience in software engineering, infrastructure, systems engineering, SRE, platform engineering, DevOps or equivalent hands-on work.
• Hands-on experience running production workloads in AWS.
• Hands-on experience running production workloads on Kubernetes, ideally Amazon EKS.
• Experience building or maintaining infrastructure with Terraform or a similar infrastructure-as-code tool.
• Experience with New Relic, Datadog or another modern observability platform.
• Experience troubleshooting production incidents and taking part in an on-call rotation.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Software development or scripting experience, enough to read, debug and make targeted changes to application or automation code.
• Working knowledge of Linux, networking, distributed systems and relational databases.
• Ability to explain root causes and tradeoffs and turn findings into practical solutions.
• Ability to run a well-scoped project with general direction and give timely updates at key milestones.
• Strong written and verbal communication and a collaborative approach across engineering disciplines.
• A habit of automating repetitive work and improving the reliability of the systems you support.
• Bonus points: experience with Ruby or Ruby on Rails.
• Bonus points: PostgreSQL administration or performance tuning experience.
• Bonus points: experience with Redis, OpenSearch or Amazon RDS.
• Bonus points: experience operating enterprise SaaS products at scale.
• Bonus points: familiarity with SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, capacity modeling or load testing.
• Bonus points: experience with payments, fintech or other regulated systems.
• Bonus points: experience supporting SOC 2 or similar security and compliance programs.
• Candidates who do not meet every requirement are encouraged to apply anyway.

Conditions

The role is remote-first and based in the United States.

Team members are expected to attend several company-wide and team-specific onsites each year.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, national origin, citizenship status, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition or any other legally protected category.

The Washington, DC office, about 12,000 square feet, is open for use at any time, and the team holds meet-ups, partner visits and retreats in various locations.