Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Varo’s SRE team is well established, designing, building, and running large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant systems that power most of Varo's operations. We live and breathe AWS and Kubernetes, having an open source first and result oriented mindset.

We are an automation and observability focused team and we strive to automate ourselves out of manual / remedial tasks. We monitor and create dashboards to promote a data-driven approach to scale out our platform. 

On a typical day, members of our team are hands-on scaling-out production infrastructure, building out CI/CD pipelines, and brainstorming with developers on how to make things better. We collectively strive to build and maintain a rapid-feedback platform that enables our engineers to accomplish their own goals instead of creating friction.

Position Overview

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will be playing a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our cloud-based services. You will drive best practices and contribute to both the design and implementation of robust cloud infrastructures as well as actively participate in shaping the technical roadmap.

What you'll be doing

• Lead and mentor a team of SREs, driving best practices and fostering a culture of reliability and performance
• Provide strategic direction in the design, implementation, and management of scalable and resilient cloud based infrastructure on AWS
• Oversee the implementation and optimization of observability solutions using OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing and monitoring
• Supervise the utilization of Prometheus and Grafana for effective monitoring and visualization system metrics and health
• Manage the design and implementation of service meshes with Istio to ensure secure and reliable service communication
• Develop and enforce SRE best practices, including incident response, post-mortem analysis and capacity planning. Help lead high-profile incidents and facilitate a blameless culture
• Collaborate with development teams and service owners to ensure alignment with reliability and performance goals
• Contribute to the technical roadmaps and Objective and Key Results (OKRs) by providing leadership and insights on improving system reliability, scalability, and performance
• Write and maintain infrastructure as code for core systems (terraform, terraform modules and kubernetes helm charts); build and maintain CI/CD pipelines
• Collaborate with development teams to implement and improve SLIs and SLOs for their services and to promote service ownership. Use monitoring data to drive actionable insights and contribute to incident response strategies.
• Automate operational tasks to save time and improve accuracy
• Write clean and scalable scripts, software and systems to manage platform infrastructure and applications.

You'll bring the following required skills and experiences

• Minimum 12 years experience as a Site Reliability, DevOps, or Software Engineer with proficiency in one or more high-level languages (such as Python, GoLang, Ruby, Java, or JavaScript) required
• Proven leadership with demonstrated experience in SRE team settings, with a focus on driving and architecting projects
• Expert Linux and troubleshooting skills. 
• Experience in building and supporting high-availability cloud environments in AWS
• Expertise using Infrastructure as code (IaC) and deployment automation with tools such as Terraform, Helm, Gitlab or equivalent
• Experience running Kubernetes and Istio in production
• Advanced Observability skills with monitoring, logging and tracing tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger/Tempo, ELK/Loki, and OpenTelemetry
• Experience instrumenting code (Java/Kotlin, Python, Go, etc.) and creating simple instrumentation frameworks for developers to adopt where auto instrumentation may fall short
• Participate in an on-call rotation for after-hours production infrastructure incidents
• Experience with SDLC, CI/CD, and related tooling
• Kafka and message streaming experience is a plus

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