Site Reliability Engineer

SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER

📍 Remote (U.S.-based) | 💼 Full-Time | 💰 Salary $110K-$130K (USD)

Join Courier Newsroom - an organization that drives journalism and empowers communities.

At Courier Newsroom, we’re reinventing local media to inform and empower communities through impactful reporting. Our mission is rooted in civic engagement and equity—and we’re growing fast.

We are presently looking for a SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER to join our team and play a critical role in maintaining and scaling our digital infrastructure.

COURIER Newsroom is committed to building an inclusive workplace that values diverse perspectives and lived experiences. We strongly encourage women, people of color, individuals with disabilities, LGBTQ+ candidates, and those from all backgrounds to apply. As an equal opportunity employer, we strive to break down barriers and ensure every team member feels seen, heard, and supported.

Job Description

We are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to join our team and play a critical role in maintaining and scaling our digital infrastructure. This position combines technical expertise with collaborative leadership, requiring someone who can manage complex systems while working closely with stakeholders across the organization. You'll be responsible for ensuring our platforms remain reliable, scalable, and secure as we grow and evolve our customer and employee-facing technology stacks.

The ideal candidate thrives in a remote environment and approaches challenges with a customer service mindset, understanding that reliable infrastructure directly impacts user experience. You'll lead key initiatives including cloud infrastructure optimization and management of Courier’s digital properties all while maintaining the highest standards of performance and security.

Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Management: Oversee current website operations and lead upcoming migration projects, ensuring zero-downtime transitions and optimal performance
• Cloud Platform Administration: Manage and optimize our production cloud infrastructure footprint, implementing secure, cost-effective scaling strategies while maintaining high availability
• Automation & DevOps: Design and implement automated environment management systems for publishing workflows and data management processes
• Monitoring, Observability, & Response: Refine and implement monitoring and alerting of production environments based on service availability and user experience measurement. Diagnose and remediate production impacting issues in a timely manner.
• Security & Access Control: Maintain comprehensive Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems, implement Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions, and security best practices across all enterprise and production platforms
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional technical and business teams, providing transparent communication and exceptional internal customer service to support business objectives
• Technical Support Liaison: Provide guidance to external MSP to ensure colleagues are receiving consistent high quality technical support
• Platform Innovation & Enhancement: Research, plan, and implement strategic enhancements to existing platforms and workflows, including emerging technologies such as GenAI solutions to improve operational efficiency and user experience

Qualifications

Technical Skills

• Infrastructure Configuration Management: Hands-on experience managing cloud infrastructure, servers using a declarative management framework such as terraform or ansible. (Python experience preferred). Possess a thorough understanding of the software development lifecycle. 
• Web Infrastructure: Demonstrated success scaling customer-facing websites to handle increased traffic and user demands, wordpress experience is a huge plus. Experience managing and performance tuning web servers & content delivery networks (CDNs)
• Content Management Systems: Practical experience managing CMS platforms, and associated information architectures (tagging, categories, etc), user/role administration, WordPress expertise strongly preferred
• SaaS Platform Management: Experience integrating and managing multiple SaaS solutions, optimizing performance, and ensuring smooth data flows in fast paced environments
• Information Security: Possess a strong working knowledge of information security best practices and experience implementing controls and policies in production environments and IT systems

Core Competencies

• Consistency and Reliability: Values creating a predictable, dependable experience in every interaction and system, understanding that people and processes thrive when they know what to expect
• Collaboration & Service: Commitment to being someone others can count on, delivering quality customer service every time
• Problem-Solving: Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills with a proactive approach to identifying, owning, and seeing potential issues through to resolution
• Strong Communication: Communicate with others in a clear & timely manner across all mediums (chat, voice, email, meetings, etc). Be able to convey complex technical ideas in a simple manner
• Remote Work Proficiency: Proven ability to work effectively in distributed, remote team environments with strong self-management and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of demonstrated experience in all of the above areas
• Experience leading and mentoring technical teams
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools and practices
• Background in DevOps methodologies and CI/CD pipeline management
• Knowledge of monitoring and alerting systems for proactive incident management
• Experience with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Understanding of security best practices and compliance requirements
• Previous experience in a large scale production environment
• Proficiency in a scripting language such as python,, javascript, or bash

Courier Newsroom offers the following benefits:

• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO) + 11 paid holidays a year
• An Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Full suite of health benefits
• 401k
• Flexible working arrangements
• $500 home office setup reimbursement

Now that you've made it to the end of the job description, be sure to let us know and include the word "tomato" at the very start of your cover letter.