The Role
Own incident response, observability standards, and SLI/SLO adoption across engineering teams. Lead incident lifecycle improvements, postmortems, runbooks, alert optimization, Datadog dashboards, error-budget practices, and reliability enablement. Partner with Infrastructure, Security, Support, and Product to improve detection and recovery times, mentor engineers, support capacity planning and chaos exercises, and drive sustainable team-owned operational excellence.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Iru
Iru is the AI-powered security & IT platform used by the world’s fastest-growing companies to secure their users, apps, and devices. Built for the AI era, Iru unifies identity & access, endpoint security & management, and compliance automation—collapsing the stack and giving IT & security time and control back.
Iru is backed by some of the smartest investors in tech—General Catalyst, Tiger Global, Felicis, Greycroft, and First Round Capital. In July 2024, Iru raised $100 million from General Catalyst, valuing the company at $850 million. Customers include Cursor, Vercel, Bumble, Plaid, Glean, Apollo, Replit, and Mercor, and Iru partners with industry leaders such as ServiceNow and AWS. Iru was named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startup Employers 2025 list for employee engagement and satisfaction.
The Opportunity
We are looking for a Senior SRE to own how we detect, respond to, and learn from incidents, and to drive consistent observability across services and teams. This role sits at the intersection of reliability engineering and cross-team enablement—you will work alongside our Infrastructure team to complement their platform-building work with a sharp focus on operational excellence and measurable reliability. You will partner with engineering and platform teams to reduce MTTD and MTTR, and to make reliability measurable, repeatable, and ultimately team-owned.
What You Will Do
- Lead and refine the incident lifecycle: detection, triage, communication, mitigation, resolution, and post-incident review.
- Define and maintain severity models, escalation paths, on-call expectations, and runbooks/playbooks—keeping them current and usable under pressure.
- Facilitate blameless postmortems; turn findings into tracked remediations and shared learning that reduces repeat incidents.
- Improve coordination during major incidents: roles, tooling, customer/stakeholder updates, and handoffs.
- Partner with security, support, and product on incident communications and regulatory or contractual obligations where applicable.
Observability Standardization & SLI/SLO Evangelism
- Establish and maintain organization-wide standards for metrics, logs, and traces in Datadog—including naming conventions, cardinality, retention, and sampling—so teams can instrument consistently and confidently.
- Define and drive adoption of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets across engineering teams; meet teams where they are—bootstrapping SLI/SLO programs for teams starting from scratch and improving rigor for teams that already have them, with the long-term goal of teams owning their own observability.
- Build and maintain reusable Datadog dashboard templates, monitor templates, and alerting patterns that teams can adopt and adapt—reducing the activation energy for doing observability well.
- Champion golden signals and RED/USE-style alerting philosophies; align alerts with user-impacting symptoms, not just low-level infrastructure noise.
- Partner with the Infrastructure team on observability stack decisions, multi-tenancy, cost controls, and data lifecycle.
- Continuously reduce alert noise through threshold tuning, ownership assignment, and on-call load management.
Reliability Culture
- Mentor engineers on operational excellence, safe deployment practices, and production readiness; help engineering teams grow their own reliability instincts.
- Contribute to capacity planning, chaos/game-day exercises, and reliability reviews for critical changes.
- Serve as a connective layer between the SRE and Infrastructure teams—aligning on tooling, standards, and shared goals.
Requirements
- Experience: 5+ years in SRE, production engineering, or equivalent, including on-call responsibility for customer-facing systems.
- Incidents: Proven experience running or significantly improving incident response (process, tooling, or both) in a distributed systems environment.
- Observability: Deep, hands-on experience with Datadog—building dashboards, monitors, and instrumentation standards across multiple teams or services. Experience with metrics, logging, and tracing at scale.
- SLI/SLO Programs: Demonstrated experience defining SLOs/SLIs and error budget policies in production; comfortable working with teams to codify the metrics their reliability posture is based on.
- Systems: Strong understanding of Linux, networking, distributed systems failure modes, and cloud or hybrid infrastructure (Kubernetes, load balancers, databases, queues).
- Automation: Proficiency in at least one of Go, Python, or similar for tooling and automation; comfort with IaC concepts (Terraform or equivalent).
- Communication: Clear written and verbal communication; ability to facilitate discussions during high-pressure incidents and deliberate postmortems alike.
- Collaboration: Track record of influencing without direct authority and driving adoption across engineering teams.
Nice to Have
- Experience with OpenTelemetry or similar vendor-neutral instrumentation strategies.
- Familiarity with PagerDuty, Incident.io, Opsgenie, or similar; Statuspage or equivalent for external communications.
- Experience in a hyper-growth startup environment.
- Experience in regulated or high-compliance environments.
- Contributions to internal developer platforms or shared reliability tooling.
What Success Looks Like
- Fewer repeated incidents and clearer, actionable postmortem outcomes that teams act on.
- Engineering teams across the org have well-defined SLIs/SLOs they own and actively use to drive reliability decisions.
- A shared Datadog observability layer with consistent signals, templated dashboards, and actionable alerts tied to user impact.
- Engineers know how to instrument, where to look, and how to respond—with sustainable, well-supported on-call.
Benefits & Perks
Competitive salary
Hybrid work environment (3 days in office per week)
100% individual and dependent medical + dental + vision coverage
401(K) with a 4% company match
20 days PTO
Iru Wellness Week the first week in July
Equity for full-time employees
In-office lunch stipend provided
Up to 16 weeks of paid leave for new parents
Paid Family and Medical Leave
Modern Health mental health benefits for individuals and dependents
Fertility benefits
Working Advantage employee discounts
Onsite fitness center
Free parking
Exciting opportunities for career growth
We are excited to be serving a significant need for a fast-growing market, and are proud of the high-performing team we have brought together so far. If you’re someone who wants to engage in new, exciting projects that will challenge your skills in the best way possible, we would love to connect with you.
At Iru, we believe in fostering an inclusive environment in which employees feel encouraged to share their unique perspectives, leverage their strengths, and act authentically. We know that diverse teams are strong teams, and welcome those from all backgrounds and varying experiences.
Iru is proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical or mental disability, protected veteran or military status or any other status protected by applicable law. #LI-Hybrid
Skills Required
- 5+ years of experience in SRE, production engineering, or equivalent, including on-call responsibility for customer-facing systems
- Experience running or significantly improving incident response processes or tooling in a distributed systems environment
- Deep hands-on experience with Datadog, including dashboards, monitors, and instrumentation standards
- Experience with metrics, logging, and tracing at scale
- Experience defining SLOs, SLIs, and error budget policies in production
- Strong understanding of Linux, networking, distributed systems failure modes, and cloud or hybrid infrastructure
- Experience with Kubernetes, load balancers, databases, and queues
- Proficiency in Go, Python, or a similar language for tooling and automation
- Familiarity with infrastructure as code concepts such as Terraform
- Clear written and verbal communication, including facilitating high-pressure incidents and postmortems
- Track record of influencing without direct authority and driving adoption across engineering teams
- Experience with OpenTelemetry or similar vendor-neutral instrumentation strategies
- Familiarity with PagerDuty, Incident.io, Opsgenie, or similar incident-management tools
- Experience with Statuspage or equivalent external communications tools
- Experience in a hyper-growth startup environment
- Experience in regulated or high-compliance environments
- Contributions to internal developer platforms or shared reliability tooling
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The Company
What We Do
Iru is the AI-powered security & IT platform used by the world’s fastest-growing companies to secure their users, apps, and devices. Built for the AI era, Iru unifies identity & access, endpoint security & management, and compliance automation—collapsing the stack and giving IT & security time and control back.
