About Drift  

Drift is the Conversational Marketing platform that combines chat, email, video, and AI to remove the friction from business buying. With Drift, you can start conversations with future customers now, on their terms -- not days later. There are over 50,000 businesses that use Drift today to accelerate revenue, shrink sales cycles, and make buying easy. Our mission is to use conversations to make business buying frictionless, more enjoyable, and more human.

About Digital First

Drift is a Digital First company, which means Remote is the primary experience for all employees. For the majority of our positions, your location is flexible! If “Remote” is stated in the job location, that role can be located anywhere Drift is authorized to do business in the United States.

Select roles may require you to be located in a city where we have a Conversation Space (currently Boston, MA, San Francisco, CA, Tampa, FL, and London, UK – with more to come across the globe), or work hours associated with a specific time zone. If this is the case, it will be explicitly stated in the job description. Please work with your recruiter and hiring manager to learn more about where Drift is authorized in the U.S. and to determine if you are eligible for employment based on your location.

About the role

As an SRE at Drift, you will work with engineering teams across the organization to improve the observability and reliability of all Drift systems. We aim to strike a balance of projects to allow us to run highly available services, reactive work to resolve issues of unreliability, and follow-on work to ensure that the reactive work is unneeded in the future.

We are the owners of the Drift observability stack which provides insights into how our services are running. This stack consists of Loki & Kibana for logging, Prometheus & Thanos for metrics, and Lightstep for tracing. We also drive the Drift engineering processes around incident response, on call, and alerting to bring the right people together at the right time with the information needed to efficiently resolve incidents.

What you'll work on:

• Help teams set and understand SLOs to enable them to view and act on the health of their services
• Create tools to manage and analyze the quality of our alerts to ensure we're alerting engineers only when action is needed from them
• Set standards for service capacity planning. Build tools to monitor and optimize utilization based on those standards
• Enable and advocate for a strong culture of testing to reduce uncertainty and increase the future reliability of services
• Plan and run gameday exercises to test the durability of services when they encounter common (and uncommon) failure modes
• Upgrade our observability infrastructure as needed to continue providing a high quality of service as we scale

Meet some of our leaders!

Whether you're an intern or a principal, you will get to work on hard problems together. We want you to bring out your unique experience and specialities.

• Melissa Leffler, VP of Engineering, joined January 2019. Melissa is building one of the best engineering teams in the business to take Drift’s products to the next level.
• Bernard Kiyanda, Director of Engineering, joined September 2019. Bernard and his team are instrumental in us expanding to our enterprise customers.
• Ivan Saskor, Director of Engineering, joined October 2020. Ivan and his team are building out solutions to create efficiencies for sales teams to close deals through automation
• Jeff Orkin, Ph.D., Head of Drift AI Lab. Jeff and his team are responsible for all things AI and building tools using ML and NLP to continuously improve our platform!
• Mate Rakic, Director of Engineering, joined June 2018. Starting out as a Tech Lead at Drift, Mate is now leading a team of engineers to innovate the way companies engage prospective buyers and make the process frictionless across the

What you’ll be doing on the team:

Day 1 you will 

• Use your onboarding time to learn how things work here and to practice writing and shipping software that makes our customers successful
• Start to dig in and get the basics down about our customers 
• Learn Drift-specific systems, product information, and review paperwork (we have to get that out of the way). 
• Meet with your manager to discuss what your first weeks at Drift will look like 

By the end of week 1 you will 

• Get to know our customer - the engineering team. We work with the rest of engineering daily and dedicate time to understanding their pains and how we can help
• Have received a first look into Drift engineering systems, culture and product process through various conversations;
• A Tour of the Drift Observability Stack
• How Product Works at Drift 
• Engineering Path of Success/ Path of Failure 
• Auth & Debugging at Drift 
• Review of Drift SDLC 
• Have transitioned from company onboarding to working on your first ship with the rest of the Reliability team 
• Have your local dev environment set up and made progress (or completed!) your first ship

By the end of month 1 you’ll 

• Meet with each member of centralized engineering to better understand how we work with the rest of Drift
• Work with your tech lead to identify and work on a series of small-to-medium projects to help you fully understand our reliability systems
• Discuss personal and professional goals with your tech lead and develop a plan to achieve those goals
• Ramp up by engaging in these product processes at Drift:
• Write your first 1-pager describing a problem to be solved by our team
• Lead a team discussion to build a plan around the 1-pager’s problem
• Begin work to solve the problem
• Once complete, celebrate the win by sharing it in our #shipyard channel

We know that applying for a new job can be intimidating. But guess what? At Drift, there is no such thing as an “ideal candidate.” We believe in the power of teamwork -- and in the desire to learn something new every day. We believe in hiring people, not just skills. Take it from our CEO. 

If this sounds like a company you would like to join and a role you would thrive in, please don’t hold back from applying! Whatever skills you bring to the table or background you’re coming from, we welcome you to start a conversation with us. We need your unique perspective for our continued innovation and success. We’re looking forward to learning more about you!

Drift is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [email protected]