Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Thrive Market is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to build the reliability foundation for its platform and establish its SRE practice. The role focuses on defining reliability objectives, improving observability, optimizing Kubernetes infrastructure, supporting migrations, and creating processes that help systems scale reliably.

Responsibilities:

• Define, implement, and own Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) across critical platform services
• Build and maintain comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability systems using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar platforms
• Establish error budgets and use them to balance feature velocity with reliability investments
• Lead incident response efforts, conduct blameless postmortems, and drive systemic improvements that prevent recurrence
• Design and implement chaos engineering practices to proactively identify failure modes before they impact members
• Architect and optimize our Kubernetes-based container orchestration platform for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
• Support large infrastructure migrations, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption to business operations
• Contribute to the evaluation and execution of potential platform migrations, with a focus on reliability planning and risk mitigation
• Design and implement automated deployment pipelines that enable rapid, error-free releases with feature flags and built-in rollback/roll-forward capabilities
• Develop and own disaster recovery plans, capacity planning models, and system hardening initiatives
• Collaborate closely with product engineering teams to help them scale their infrastructure in AWS and adopt SRE best practices
• Help establish SRE as a practice at Thrive Market, defining the team’s charter, processes, and engagement model with product engineering teams
• Champion a culture of operational excellence, continuous improvement, and data-driven reliability decisions
• Create and maintain technical documentation covering architecture decisions, runbooks, incident response procedures, and operational playbooks
• Participate in weekly on-call rotations and help build sustainable on-call practices that avoid burnout
• Identify systemic problems and inefficiencies across the engineering organization and make strategic recommendations for improvement

Requirements:

• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering, with a proven track record of improving reliability at rapidly growing companies
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes (K8s) — including cluster management, Helm charts, service meshes, and production-grade container orchestration
• Strong systems engineering background with advanced proficiency in Linux administration
• Advanced scripting and automation skills in Bash, Python, Golang, Ruby, or similar languages
• Extensive experience with core AWS services including EC2, ECS/EKS, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, Route 53, RDS, and Lambda
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar)
• Hands-on experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets in production environments
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling deployments)
• Expertise in monitoring and observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, or similar)
• Strong knowledge of web application infrastructure, networking, load balancing, and security best practices
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to lead incident response and facilitate blameless postmortems
• Experience with e-commerce platforms (Magento, Shopify, or comparable) and the unique reliability challenges they present at scale
• Experience with ConcourseCI, Github Actions (GHA) or similar deployment frameworks
• Experience with chaos engineering tools and practices (Gremlin, Litmus, Chaos Monkey, or similar)
• Familiarity with GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux) and service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)
• Experience building and managing cost-optimization strategies for cloud infrastructure
• Background in establishing SRE practices in organizations transitioning from traditional DevOps models
• Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar)