Principal SRE
Principal SRE owning the stability, scalability, and reliability of Backblaze's cloud storage production systems — leading on-call/incident response, defining SLIs/SLOs, and building observability and automation. Core tech: Linux, Kubernetes/Vitess, Terraform, Prometheus/Grafana, and scripting in Python, Bash, or Go.
- Compensation
- $215K–$250K / yr
- Location
- Remote - US
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Sre
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- 10+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations
- Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems, including establishing operational procedures or runbooks
- Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills
- Proven ability to leverage AI tools to improve platform stability and scalability
- Knowledge of storage systems, performance, sharding and storage algorithms
- Experience in load balancing services including IPVS
- Security-minded operations (patching, hardening, identifying vulnerabilities)
- Familiarity with service reliability concepts — monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis
- Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go)
- Experience working with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts
- Comfortable operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces)
- Experience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform)
Nice to have
- Experience with hyperscalers
- Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment
- Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLOs/SLAs
- Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
Full description
**About Backblaze
Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.
Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.
But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Principal SRE to join our team!
About the Role
We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience collaborating in cross functional teams to manage the design, implementation and ongoing management of the Backblaze core infrastructure. You will be approved to demonstrate strong observability skills, process and service improvement and ability to leverage AI and automation to assist to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand..
As a technical leader in Backblaze you will be expected to work across the organisation to achieve our goals. This will include working with our executives and customers. The role will focus long term strategic focus on platform stability.
Key Responsibilities
Service Reliability & Operations
- Own the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and accountability for outcomes.
- Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.
- Assist and advise on the design of service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk; partner with service owners to define/iterate SLIs/SLOs and establish error budget policies and alerting.
- Participate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
- Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).
Architect and Design
- Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.