The Role
Set technical direction for Rootly’s platform engineering function, defining platform standards, shared infrastructure primitives, observability practices, SLOs, and reliability guardrails. Build developer self-service tooling, drive adoption across engineering teams, improve incident management, and mentor senior engineers. Partner with leadership on platform vision and roadmap while solving infrastructure challenges through production-grade software. The role requires deep cloud, distributed systems, reliability, Rails or equivalent framework, and job-system expertise.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Rootly
About the Role
What You'll Do
What You'll Need
Minimum Qualifications
Preferred Qualifications
What Success Looks Like
Our Tech Stack
Why Rootly?
At Rootly, we are on a mission to be the go-to way companies respond when things go wrong, helping every organization be more reliable. We do this by building an industry-leading incident management platform that allows companies around the world to consistently and quickly resolve incidents. We are not simply transforming an industry, we are carving out a new multi-billion-dollar category ourselves and need incredible talent to achieve this ambitious goal together.
Customers love Rootly. Some of the fastest-growing companies around the world, such as NVIDIA, DoorDash, Uber, Canva, Tripadvisor, Squarespace, and more, rely on Rootly to power their critical incident management process. They obsess over our delightful enterprise-ready platform and unique partnership model. See why our customers have rated us 5 stars on G2.
Investors love Rootly. We are backed by some of the most respected funds in the world, from Y Combinator to operators like the CTOs of Dropbox and GitHub. We'd be happy to disclose our entire funding and profitability picture live during the interview. As a culture, we relentlessly put transparency first. We conduct monthly financial reviews as a team so everyone has a pulse on the health of the business, and we publish what we are building in our weekly changelog.
As a Staff Platform Engineer, you'll set the technical direction for how Rootly's services are built and run, and lead our paved road: the shared standards, primitives, and guardrails that let product teams ship safely without reinventing them. You'll partner with engineering leadership to help define a platform vision centred on two things: reliability our customers can count on at 3 a.m., and a developer experience that lets every engineer here ship fast without fear.
You'll treat the platform as a product. Product engineers are your customers, and paved roads, golden paths, and self-service tooling are how you serve them. You'll work across engineering, product, security, quality assurance, and support to make sure the platform keeps pace with where the business is going.
- Partner with our platform engineering leader to define the platform vision and roadmap, with reliability and developer experience as the two pillars.
- Turn that vision into a sequenced plan that other engineers can pick up and run with, and make the trade-offs visible to leadership.
- Work across teams on platform standards and service readiness checklists, and drive adoption of best practices.
- Design shared primitives every service needs, such as rate limits, fair queues, timeouts, and per-tenant fan-out budgets, so the right way is the easy way.
- Set the standard for observability across Rootly, and define SLOs and error budgets with the teams who own production services.
- Fix the class of problem, not the instance: when an incident exposes a gap, turn the fix into a guardrail.
- Raise the bar on how Rootly runs its own incidents and retrospectives. We should be the best example of our own product.
- Mentor senior engineers, write the design docs others learn from, and grow the platform team as it scales.
What You'll Need
We care about impact, ownership, and technical judgement. Degrees and big-name logos are not required. What matters is your ability to execute, influence, and lead without authority.
- 8+ years building software in production, with significant time in Platform, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering.
- A track record of setting technical direction for a platform or infrastructure area and driving impact across multiple teams.
- Deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and reliability practices.
- Strong command of observability, performance tuning, and scaling for web services at meaningful scale.
- Deep knowledge of Rails and Sidekiq internals, or equivalent depth in another large web framework and job system.
- You solve infrastructure problems with production-grade software, not shell scripts alone.
- Clear written communication. You can write the design doc that changes an org's mind.
Preferred Qualifications
- You've built or led an internal developer platform and can point to adoption and outcomes, not just shipped features.
- You've written an engineering standard and built the tooling that made teams actually follow it.
- You've led an infrastructure migration or re-architecture without stopping product delivery.
- Experience with Ruby and Go.
What Success Looks Like
Within 6 to 12 months, you will have:
- Published a platform vision and sequenced roadmap that engineering leadership has aligned on.
- Launched service tiers and a service readiness checklist that product teams use before shipping new services.
- Put SLOs and error budgets in place for Rootly's most critical services, each with a clear owner.
- Turned recurring incident causes into automated guardrails, so the same class of problem doesn't page us twice.
Our Tech Stack
- Backend: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Sidekiq, AWS Lambda, ECS, Kafka, DynamoDB.
- Frontend: Turbo, Stimulus, ViewComponent.
- Infrastructure: AWS, Terraform (IaC), Datadog.
Why Rootly?
We're not just another startup. We're building something category-defining and want teammates who crave ownership, love solving hard problems, and thrive in a high-bar, high-impact environment.
Here's what you can expect when you join Rootly:
- Competitive compensation and early equity in a fast-growing, venture-backed company.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- 3 weeks of vacation, plus unlimited sick and mental health days, and a company-wide end-of-year shutdown to recharge.
- $500 stipend for home office setup.
- Unlimited token usage and access to AI tools.
- A fast-moving, high-impact environment where your leadership and ideas directly shape the future of the company.
This is a newly created vacancy.
As we build out the team, we may use AI to support parts of our interview process, like reviewing assessments, but it's a tool that helps our people, not a substitute for their judgement.
If this sounds like the kind of challenge and opportunity you're looking for, apply now and let's build something great together.
Accommodations are available on request at any stage of our recruitment process. Contact [email protected] and we will work with you to meet your needs confidentially.
Rootly is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, record of offences, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code or applicable law.
Skills Required
- 8+ years building software in production, including significant experience in Platform, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering
- Track record of setting technical direction for a platform or infrastructure area and driving impact across multiple teams
- Deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and reliability practices
- Strong command of observability, performance tuning, and scaling web services at meaningful scale
- Deep knowledge of Rails and Sidekiq internals, or equivalent depth in another large web framework and job system
- Ability to solve infrastructure problems with production-grade software, not shell scripts alone
- Clear written communication, including the ability to write influential design documents
- Experience building or leading an internal developer platform with demonstrated adoption and outcomes
- Experience writing engineering standards and building tooling that drives compliance
- Experience leading an infrastructure migration or re-architecture without stopping product delivery
- Experience with Ruby and Go
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The Company
What We Do
Rootly is an incident management platform on Slack that helps automate manual admin work during incidents. Leading companies such as NVIDIA, Squarespace, Canva, Grammarly, OpenSea, Figma, and countless others trust Rootly to build a consistent incident response process. See why they rate us 5 stars on G2: https://www.g2.com/products/rootly-manage-incidents-on-slack/reviews
