The real world is the next frontier, and at Metropolis, we are creating the artificial intelligence to make it responsive. We are pioneering the Recognition Economy — a future where mundane repetition disappears and being known unlocks access, comfort, and belonging everywhere you go. From transforming parking into a seamless drive-in, drive-out experience for millions of Members to expanding our intelligence layer across retail and hospitality, we are building a world that feels instinctive and magical. The future isn’t coming; it’s here, and we need builders, innovators, and problem solvers to help us create it.
Who you areMetropolis is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on Reliability to own reliability across the entire Metropolis platform and drive the comprehensive practices that ensure system availability, resilience, and observability for our mission-critical mobility infrastructure. In this role, you will build reliability from first principles, architecting failover systems, implementing chaos engineering, and improving our observability foundation to maintain 99.9%+ uptime as we scale to new markets.
As the technical owner of our reliability posture, you will tackle challenges like external service failover, dependency mirroring, and database replication, working alongside highly technical teams across the organization to influence architecture decisions and establish company-wide reliability standards. You will join the Product Foundations team, playing a key role in building the foundational infrastructure that powers the future of mobility commerce.
What you'll do- Own the overall reliability posture for the Metropolis platform, establishing practices, metrics, and systems that ensure 99.9%+ uptime across all services
- Design and implement automatic failover mechanisms for critical external dependencies like Twilio for SMS/voice and Stripe for payments with circuit breakers, retry policies, and degraded mode operations
- Architect and build active-passive or active-active regional deployment strategies with database replication, automated failover, and DNS-based traffic routing including disaster recovery planning and testing
- Establish comprehensive monitoring using Datadog for APM, logs, and metrics correlation
- Implement synthetic monitoring, SLO-based alerting, on-call rotation, and escalation policies while building service health dashboards that show customer impact
- Own the incident management process including workflows, tooling, post-mortem culture, runbook automation, and MTTR reduction initiatives to drive down mean time to recovery from detection to resolution
- Drive adoption of resilience patterns across all services including health checks, graceful degradation, feature flags, rate limiting, backpressure mechanisms, and chaos engineering practices
- Build and maintain local mirrors for critical dependencies with artifact caching, dependency pinning, and vulnerability scanning to prevent build failures from upstream outages
- 8+ years of engineering experience including software engineering, reliability engineering, SRE practices, or production operations at scale
- Demonstrate expert-level reliability engineering skills including hands-on experience with multi-region architectures, failover automation, circuit breakers, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery
- Utilize production observability expertise with deep experience implementing monitoring, alerting, tracing, and logging systems at scale – specifically Datadog or similar APM platforms in high-load environments
- Apply strong systems thinking with proven ability to design resilient distributed systems that gracefully handle failures, network partitions, and external dependency outages
- Demonstrate database and data systems knowledge including replication strategies, backup/restore procedures, connection pooling, query optimization, and experience with both relational and NoSQL databases
- Leverage cloud platform expertise with production experience operating and ensuring reliability of systems on AWS including multi-region deployments, load balancing, and DNS-based failover
- Possess experience with AI-powered development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar agentic coding tools for enhanced productivity – context engineering in particular
- Exhibit excellent technical communication with ability to influence technical decisions across teams, document complex systems, conduct post-mortems, and establish reliability standards organization-wide
- Demonstrate expert-level Java and/or Scala proficiency with strong understanding of JVM performance, concurrency, and operational characteristics
- Bring Scala experience
- Possess SRE or Reliability Engineering experience at companies known for operational excellence such as Google, Amazon, Netflix or high-growth startups where you built reliability practices from the ground up
- Demonstrate incident response leadership including experience building incident management processes, conducting blameless post-mortems, and driving MTTR reduction initiatives in production environments
- Utilize chaos engineering experience with tools like Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, or similar, including designing and executing game days and failure injection testing
- Exhibit performance optimization experience with profiling, benchmarking, capacity planning, and system tuning at hyperscale including experience optimizing for high-throughput, low-latency systems
- Show open source contributions or technical blog writing that demonstrates depth of expertise in reliability engineering, distributed systems, or production operations
- Languages + Frameworks: TypeScript, React, Scala (principally), Java (limited)
- Datastores: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Snowflake
- Cloud: AWS
- Version control: Git & GitHub
- AI Tooling: Copilot on GitHub
- Observability: Datadog
3 Days in Office: Metropolis values in-person collaboration to drive innovation, strengthen culture, and enhance the Member experience. Our corporate team members hold to our office-first model, which requires employees to be on-site at least four days a week, fostering organic interactions that spark creativity and connection
When you join Metropolis, you'll join a team of world-class product leaders and engineers, building an ecosystem of technologies at the intersection of parking, mobility, and real estate. Our goal is to build an inclusive culture where everyone has a voice and the best idea wins.#LI-KB1 #LI-Onsite
Metropolis may utilize an automated employment decision tool (AEDT) to assess or evaluate your candidacy for employment or promotion. AEDTs are used to assist in assessing a candidate’s application relative to the required job qualifications and responsibilities listed in the job posting.
As part of this process, Metropolis retains data relevant to your candidacy, including personal information, for a period that is reasonably necessary for the use of the tool. If you are hired for the position, your data may become part of your employee records.
Metropolis Technologies is an equal opportunity employer. We make all hiring decisions based on merit, qualifications, and business needs, without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, or pregnancy), national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under federal, state, or local law.
Skills Required
- 8+ years of engineering experience, including software engineering, reliability engineering, SRE practices, or production operations at scale
- Expert reliability engineering experience with multi-region architectures, failover automation, circuit breakers, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery
- Production observability experience implementing monitoring, alerting, tracing, and logging systems at scale, using Datadog or similar APM platforms
- Experience designing resilient distributed systems that handle failures, network partitions, and external dependency outages
- Database and data systems knowledge, including replication, backup and restore, connection pooling, query optimization, and relational and NoSQL databases
- Production AWS experience, including multi-region deployments, load balancing, and DNS-based failover
- Experience with AI-powered development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar agentic coding tools
- Excellent technical communication skills, including influencing technical decisions, documenting complex systems, conducting post-mortems, and establishing reliability standards
- Expert-level Java and/or Scala proficiency, including JVM performance, concurrency, and operational characteristics
- Scala experience
- SRE or reliability engineering experience at an operationally excellent company or high-growth startup
- Incident response leadership, including incident management processes, blameless post-mortems, and MTTR reduction
- Chaos engineering experience with tools such as Chaos Monkey or Gremlin
- Performance optimization experience with profiling, benchmarking, capacity planning, and system tuning at hyperscale
- Open source contributions or technical blog writing demonstrating expertise in reliability engineering, distributed systems, or production operations
What the Team is Saying
Metropolis Technologies Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare is described as subsidized for full-time and hourly staff, with dental, vision, and mental-health support highlighted on employer and third-party pages. Some listings also reference highly subsidized options, including fully covered or $0‑deductible plans.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off is presented as flexible and generous, with many salaried roles described as having unlimited PTO. Paid holidays are observed, and those who work holidays are said to receive double pay.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) plan with a company match is promoted on official and aggregator pages, though the exact match level differs by source. This positioning indicates active support for retirement savings.
Metropolis Technologies Insights
What We Do
Metropolis Technologies, Inc. is an artificial intelligence company whose computer vision platform enables checkout-free payment experiences for the real world. Its proprietary AI-driven technology reaches more than 50 million customers while reducing costs, increasing transparency and capturing additional revenue for real estate partners. Following its take-private acquisition of SP+, Metropolis is now the largest parking network in North America with more than 4,000 locations. To learn more about Metropolis, please visit www.metropolis.io.
Why Work With Us
We’re not your typical technology company. We’re world-class software and hardware engineers, we’re neighborhood urbanists and operators, we’re caring customer support specialists, we’re nerdy data scientists and machine learning engineers, we’re designers and architects… and many things in-between and beyond.
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Metropolis Technologies Offices
OnSite Workspace
Metropolis values in-person collaboration to drive innovation, strengthen culture, and enhance the Member experience. Our corporate team members hold to our office-first model, which requires employees to be on-site at least four days a week.
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