Lead Tech SRE

Accountabilities

• Own the target architecture of the managed cloud platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including dedicated customer environments, clusters, networks, databases, queues, infrastructure templates, and regional deployment strategy.

• Define the architectural roadmap and guide the platform's evolution from Beta to General Availability, balancing customer isolation, reliability, scalability, and infrastructure costs.

• Write and maintain technical specifications, design documents, RFCs, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), clearly explaining technical trade-offs and implementation choices.

• Define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for services and service tiers, using them to guide engineering priorities.

• Lead technical delivery across a team of three, including yourself, by breaking down architectural plans into actionable work, assigning responsibilities, reviewing implementation, and removing blockers.

• Establish engineering standards for Terraform modules, Helm charts, infrastructure configuration, and GitOps practices.

• Automate the complete customer-instance lifecycle, including provisioning, upgrades, scaling, backups, migrations, and decommissioning.

• Own the deployment and release strategy using ArgoCD and GitHub Actions, implementing progressive rollouts, rollback mechanisms, and safe upgrades across customer environments.

• Build and maintain an end-to-end observability stack covering metrics, logs, traces, and alerting to identify and resolve issues proactively.

• Lead on-call operations and incident response, including rotation planning, runbooks, blameless postmortems, and implementation of corrective actions.

• Plan infrastructure capacity for variable workloads and ensure autoscaling strategies remain effective and reliable.

• Drive cloud cost optimization through FinOps practices, including customer-level cost visibility, resource right-sizing, committed-use discounts, and appropriate use of spot instances.

• Strengthen platform security in collaboration with the security engineer, covering network policies, workload identity, secrets management, and audit trails in support of SOC 2 expectations.

• Collaborate with core platform engineering to identify product improvements that simplify cloud operations and improve platform reliability.

• Lead the technical milestones for the first six months, including architecture assessment, GA specifications and SLOs, automated customer provisioning, observability coverage, and safe upgrade capabilities.

Requirements:

• At least 8 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, including a minimum of 2 years leading technical direction for a team or platform.

• Deep, production-grade Kubernetes expertise, including experience operating clusters at scale and managing upgrades, configuration drift, networking, and resource allocation.

• Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, particularly GKE, IAM, VPC networking, private clusters, load balancing, and managed data services.

• Expert-level Terraform skills, including the design of reusable module structures and state management approaches that support multiple identical customer environments.

• Proven ability to define technical architecture, write detailed specifications, evaluate trade-offs, and translate designs into executable engineering plans.

• Demonstrated experience coordinating technical delivery, reviewing implementation, and guiding a small engineering team.

• Strong operational experience with on-call rotations, incident management, postmortems, and implementing lasting reliability improvements.

• Background operating SaaS products for paying customers, with direct responsibility for production reliability and meaningful SLOs.

• Fluent English and the ability to work independently and collaboratively in a fully remote international environment.

• Pragmatic engineering judgment, with the ability to choose straightforward, maintainable solutions and clearly explain technical decisions.

• Nice to have: Experience operating workloads that execute untrusted or user-defined code, including sandboxing, gVisor, or node-pool isolation.

• Experience building or operating control planes for dedicated customer environments using Kubernetes operators, Crossplane, GKE Fleet, Config Sync, or custom provisioning systems.

• Practical GCP FinOps experience, including customer-level cost attribution, committed-use discounts, and spot node pools.

• Exposure to SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audits from an infrastructure or platform engineering perspective.

• Familiarity with workflow orchestration platforms such as Airflow, Temporal, or similar technologies, or experience with the JVM in production.

• Experience with technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, Kafka, and AMQP.

Benefits:

• Fully remote working arrangement, with the flexibility to work from anywhere.

• Access to coworking spaces worldwide for additional flexibility.

• Health coverage, including medical, dental, and vision benefits.

• Home-office equipment provided to support a comfortable and productive remote setup.

• Opportunity to lead the technical direction of a growing cloud platform and take ownership of major architectural decisions.

• Hands-on engineering leadership within a small, collaborative team.

• Close collaboration with senior technical leadership and platform engineering specialists.