Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Your passion for uptime was forged from experience in production and refined through incident response. You’re an Expel Principal Site Reliability Engineer - a protector, champion, and leader of Expel's reputation for service reliability.

Innovation comes naturally to you, but you're also eager to help others. You understand that operational reliability is a shared mission across all of engineering, and that your role is to make it as easy as possible for Expel to achieve that mission. You spend your mornings collaborating with architects and product stakeholders to outline the next quarter’s reliability initiatives, then the afternoon pair-programming with a junior SRE to mentor them in debugging a tricky Kubernetes deployment.

You apply your dedication to reliability and collaboration with the broader SRE community to ensure Expel maintains outstanding reliability standards within the cloud native ecosystem.

You take pride in all the nines of uptime you’ve achieved, but you know that an SRE’s job is never done!

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What Expel can do for you

• Provide an opportunity to grow and maintain reliability-focused platform features within a cloud native engineering platform using modern infrastructure and tooling (Kubernetes/GKE/EKS runtime, Hashicorp toolset, etc)
• Provide you a mission you can get behind: stopping evil hackers so our customers can focus on their business
• Be included in a company focused on creating opportunities to do interesting work and creating space for employees to learn and grow
• An opportunity to contribute to a best-in-class product
• A leadership team that’s embraced modern Site Reliability principles, as outlined by Google and other industry leaders.

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What you can do for Expel

• Lead project work to build and maintain platform features that cut across the Expel product’s reliability, networking, and cloud infrastructure.
• Contribute by pushing IaC commits daily, with occasional opportunities to write and test application code in Python, Golang, and Javascript
• Mentor and motivate service owners on how to use the platform in order to deploy, measure, monitor, and operate their own services at scale.
• Participate in a weekly support rotation that includes taking the on-call pager and providing nearly on-demand working-hours support to platform users.
• Lead incident response, triage, and root cause analysis support
• Poke fun at our leadership team in creative ways.

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What you should bring with you

• A passion for learning and improving your work product
• Significant experience operating Kubernetes within highly distributed environments
• Experience running systems in GCP or AWS
• Exposure to monitoring and observability infrastructure and standard methodologies
• An understanding of infrastructure-as-code practices, tools, and patterns
• Some experience developing software in Linux environments, preferably with Python and/or Golang
• A customer-minded approach that enables the success of platform users as well as building trust across the organization.
• A collaborative disposition that allows you to work optimally on and across teams
• Six years of systems experience either in operations or development
• Missing some items on the list? That's ok! We still want to talk to you!

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How our team works together

We build and run teams where everyone is pulling in the same direction and is learning from each other:

• We work out of a shared backlog
• We pair-program weekly, as it makes sense
• We peer-review everything
• We do weekly blame-free retros to reinforce what’s going well, so we do more of it, and surface what’s not going well, so we can do something about it. Same thing for projects and significant operational problems.

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Our hiring process

We respect your time. You’ll hear from us by the end of the next business day after completing an interview.

We also have a goal that all Expletives have a great manager and have a voice in how their team is run and who runs it. It’s not the shortest process in the industry, but you’ll get to meet nearly everyone you’ll work with day-to-day and your Engineering leadership. New Expletives consistently say our interview process gave them an accurate picture of what it’s like to work here.

Here’s our 3-stage process for this position (5.5 hours total interviewing time):

• Chat with a recruiter (30 min)
• Video interview with hiring manager (Engineering Manager) (60 minutes)
• Pair programming interview (with two engineers) (60 minutes)
• “Virtual onsite interview” (can be scheduled contiguous or broken up, 60 minutes each):
• Engineering leadership (Engineering Director and Manager of Delivery Experience)
• System design interview (with two engineers)
• Technology and skills interview (with two engineers)

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Additional details

This role is remote within the United States.

The base salary range for this role is between $167,300 USD and $242,600 USD + bonus eligibility and equity. While the full salary band reflects our long-term compensation framework, we're primarily targeting candidates between $195,000 and $225,000 based on experience, skills, and market data.

We believe in paying transparently and equitably. Your salary will ultimately be based on factors such as your experience, skills, team equity, and market data. You’ll also be eligible for unlimited PTO (which we model and encourage), work location flexibility, up to 24 weeks of parental leave, and really excellent health benefits.

We’re only hiring those authorized to work in the United States. We do not currently sponsor immigration visas.

We're an Equal Opportunity Employer: You'll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

We’ll ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please let us know if you need accommodation of any kind.

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