Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Staff-level hands-on SRE setting the technical direction for reliability at Ethos Life: designing AWS/Kubernetes/Terraform infrastructure, driving SLIs/SLOs and incident response, and building AI platform tooling like LLM gateways and cloud cost management. Codes in Golang, Python, or TypeScript and mentors SREs across US and Bangalore teams.
- Compensation
- $156K–$275K / yr
- Location
- Remote US
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Sre
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years of full-time software engineering experience in SRE, Infrastructure, Platform, DevOps, or Backend SWE, including significant time operating production systems at scale
- Track record of leading complex, multi-team infrastructure or reliability initiatives from ambiguity to delivery and influencing technical direction beyond immediate team
- Strong coding skills in Golang, Python, or TypeScript with commitment to design patterns, code reviews, and testing
- Deep, hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, PostgreSQL, CI/CD systems, and observability tooling such as DataDog
- Hands-on experience implementing SLIs/SLOs, leading incident response, and running effective post-mortems
- Excellent written and verbal communication; able to write clear design docs and build consensus across teams
- Strong desire to remove toil and judgment to balance reliability, velocity, and cost
Nice to have
- Experience building Kubernetes operators
- Experience building or operating LLM toolchains such as AI gateways, model routing (Bedrock, Anthropic), and governance frameworks with PII scanning and audit trails
- Demonstrated experience leading cloud cost optimization or building usage metering systems
- Experience in regulated industries (insurance, fintech, healthcare) or with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2
- Experience collaborating with globally distributed teams
Full description
About EthosEthos (Nasdaq: $LIFE) is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.
About the role
Ethos is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a technical leader for our SRE organization in the US. In this role, you will help set the technical direction for how Ethos builds, runs, and scales production systems, from our core AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure to the internal platforms and toolchains that power our AI initiatives.
This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with organization-wide scope. You will design and build critical infrastructure yourself, lead cross-team initiatives from conception to delivery, and raise the reliability bar across engineering by partnering closely with product teams, up to and including submitting PRs to their codebases. You will work alongside SRE leadership in the US and Bangalore to shape the roadmap, and you will be a go-to technical authority for reliability, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership & Strategy
- Set Direction: Define and drive the multi-quarter technical strategy for reliability, infrastructure, and platform tooling, in partnership with SRE and engineering leadership and aligned with company OKRs.
- Architecture: Lead the design of complex, cross-cutting infrastructure systems. Author and review technical specifications and architecture proposals to ensure consistency, resilience, and long-term maintainability.
- Influence Without Authority: Motivate product engineering teams to adopt reliability best practices, and act as a trusted advisor on production readiness when new services are designed and brought online.
- Mentorship: Grow the technical skills of SREs across our US and Bangalore teams through design reviews, pairing, and code review, and help raise the hiring bar by participating in interviews.
Reliability & Performance Engineering
- Service Standards: Establish the framework for how teams define, measure, and act on SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets. Help teams instrument and monitor them.
- Incident Excellence: Serve as a senior technical leader during high-severity incidents. Drive a culture of rigorous, blameless post-mortems and ensure follow-up work actually reduces recurrence.