Senior Site Reliability Engineer

What We’re Building

Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!

At Honeycomb, the SRE team owns reliability practices across the organization, and we get to dogfood cutting-edge tools relevant to our role. We’ve also written a bunch publicly about our thoughts on such topics as how we define our team’s work, how Honeycomb uses SLOs, monitoring Kubernetes, and which incidents get a retro (and why).

Who We Are

How We Work

We are a remote-first company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1. #LI-Remote

We are open to a Midlevel and Senior SRE for this role

We can hire for this position in the United States and Canada

What You’ll Do:

• Embed with an engineering team (or two) and help them learn how their software operates in production! We have an emerging playbook for understanding their needs and leveling them up - you could be running game days to help with on-call confidence, facilitating incident retros, talking them through a scaling exercise, or something we haven’t thought of.
• Facilitate organizational learning with incidents - either running them yourself, or helping others run them (even better!). We have lots of internal resources and support for learning how to do this well.
• Enhance our developer experience - we try to understand engineering teams' pain points, especially as they affect reliability, and either fix them ourselves or empower others to.
• Influence on-call and incident response (and retro) practices. Our team owns these practices for the company; we’re not the only team on-call, but we define “on-call” for the company, including on-call training and setting up new on-call rotations.
• Measuring and improving whole-product reliability - proposing roadmap items for our team, cross-org initiatives, improving communication between engineering teams and the rest of the company, improving global on-call practices, etc. We don’t see reliability as just 9’s - we try to steward the entire sociotechnical system.
• For Senior folks - identify and run larger, possibly oddly shaped or cross-org projects; we’re uniquely positioned to notice when and where the system might start creaking, so collaborating with the team and contributing to the roadmap (whether it’s ours or someone else’s) is key.
• Optional: this team has opportunities to share our thinking by blogging (linked at the beginning of this job description) talking to customers and prospects, and speaking at conferences. Far from required! But if you like doing this, or haven’t done it but want to try, we have lots of opportunities and people who are excited to help.

What You’ll Bring:

• Experience managing infrastructure. We keep (nearly) everything AWS in Terraform managed by Terraform Cloud; occasionally, we need to do some things outside of this workflow and either get the code up to speed or get rid of them (did you know removed {} blocks are a thing now?). (Senior level - level up our usage of AWS.)
• Enjoyment of the social parts of the job. We’re not always writing code! We learn from each other, collaborate heavily within and outside the team, bring people along, ask questions, and try to continually build trust. Good project management skills will take us a long way, communicating early and often, identifying stakeholders, being clear on exit criteria, and knowing the difference between running vs. working a project (and when to do either) is key.
• Care about people. This team is starting to take more ownership over the backend developer experience, and teams are very different in terms of where they are / where they want to go. Some newer teams might have never instrumented an SLO, and some more core teams might want help planning their multi-year scaling goals or doing a game day to flex their incident response muscle.
• Curiosity and an interest in experimentation. This team works by learning - we do this individually, as pairs, as a team, and as a company (incidents are opportunities to learn, not action item factories). We ask questions about systems with an eye towards better understanding their strengths and weaknesses. We love a good feedback loop.
• Focus on the user, and keeping business outcomes in mind. Asking questions on a regular basis like - how can we measure success? Why are we doing the things we do? (“If we don’t, we’ll pay for it later” is a valid answer.) What are the risks if we don’t change?
• For Senior folks - Experience setting technical direction. This isn’t just bringing in the tool from your last job (though it could be) - balancing tradeoffs and risk while knowing how to gain commitment and see a rollout through is a key aspect of the job. We have lots of trust with the org, so we want to make sure we’re holding ourselves accountable to our outcomes.

What You Get When You Join The Hive!

• Base pay (range) of $165,000 - $190,000 USD for Midlevel, $190,000 - $205,000 USD for Senior
• A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
• It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
• Compensation benchmarked to San Francisco market - no matter where you live (or move)!
• 401k plan to help you plan for your future
• A remote-first mindset and culture (really!)
• 100% employee coverage for Health, Dental, Vision, Life and Disability insurance
• Time to Recharge - In addition to our Unlimited PTO policy, we provide ~23 days off through out the year. This includes a company wide break at the end of the year, and we honor having at least one three day weekend a month (if there is not already a locally observed holiday that month, we add one!)
• Pick Your Perk - $600 a year to spend on the perks that you care about most
• Work Life Balance and Flexible Schedule options
• The tech you need AND a $500 Home Setup Stipend
• $200 Monthly Reimbursement for Cell/Wifi/CoWorking
• $1500+ Annual Professional Development Allowance
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
• Maven Inclusive Family-Building benefit including unlimited virtual appointments, coaches & counselors, and $10K ‘wallet’ to support adoption, surrogacy, IVF, and egg/sperm freezing
• Semi-annual performance conversations (we call them Review & Rewards conversations) - so you know where you stand, and how you’ll be rewarded for your impact
• Annual compensation review, benchmarking to industry and inflation changes

Please note we cannot currently sponsor or do visa transfers at this time.

Diversity & Accommodations:

We're building a diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other, and welcome nontraditional candidates, and people of all backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. You don't need to be a millennial to join us, all gens are welcome! Further, we (of course) follow federal and state disability laws and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations during the application phase, interview process, and employment. Please email [email protected] to discuss accessible formats or accommodations. As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work; if we can do better - we want to know!