Site Reliability Engineer

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Dremio, you'll drive continuous improvements in our Kubernetes usage, collaborate with engineering on service readiness, and develop automation strategies. You'll also establish Service Level Indicators and Objectives (SLIs/SLOs), participate in incident response, and promote resilience engineering best practices across the organization.

To qualify for the Site Reliability Engineer role at Dremio, you should have at least 3 years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or similar fields. Familiarity with tools and technologies like Kubernetes, Istio, Terraform, and cloud services such as GCP, AWS, and Azure is crucial, along with a strong command of programming languages like Python or Go.

Dremio embraces a hybrid work model, allowing employees to work from home while also fostering team collaboration through Workplace Wednesdays. These in-office days promote relationship-building and communication, complemented by provided meal credits and local social events to enhance community.

Site Reliability Engineers at Dremio participate in an on-call rotation to support the systems and services they manage. This entails responding to incidents, conducting post-incident analyses, and implementing improvements for future reliability, ensuring a healthy work-life balance through structured management of on-call duties.

At Dremio, the culture of continuous improvement in reliability engineering is ingrained within the SRE team. Engineers are encouraged to advocate for reliability practices, perform post-mortem analyses, and lead initiatives that drive technical and process changes aimed at enhancing service reliability and operational efficiency.

Speak to specific projects where you utilized Kubernetes, detailing how you managed deployments, scaled applications, or resolved issues. Highlight your understanding of best practices in Kubernetes environments and how you might apply these experiences to improve Dremio’s service reliability.

Discuss your systematic approach to incident response, highlighting processes such as defining escalation paths, conducting post-incident reviews, and improving documentation for faster resolution times. Emphasize teamwork, communication, and how you incorporate lessons learned into ongoing practices.

Explain your experience identifying key metrics based on user experience and service performance. Share methodologies you've used for tracking SLIs/SLOs, setting targets, and how monitoring tools enable proactive management of service reliability.

Share a specific instance where you identified and resolved issues in a codebase, discussing the tools and methodologies you employed. Highlight your troubleshooting skills and your thought process in making optimizations that resulted in improved system performance.

Define resilience engineering in your own words, emphasizing its importance in maintaining uptime and reliability. Offer ideas on fostering a culture of resilience, such as leading workshops, sharing case studies, or proposing frameworks to embed resilience into engineering processes.

Explain the principles of GitOps and your experience applying them. Share examples where you have implemented GitOps workflows to automate deployments, enhance collaboration among teams, and ensure consistency and traceability in the infrastructure as code.

Detail a specific scenario involving a challenge in a distributed system, describing how you approached the problem with a methodical analysis and the steps taken to find a solution. Emphasize teamwork and outcomes that improved system reliability.

Discuss the observability tools you have found most effective, such as Prometheus, Grafana, or New Relic, and explain how you've used them to track system health, analyze performance data, and increase reliability within past roles.

Talk about your communication strategies and practices to ensure meaningful collaboration with engineering teams. Highlight the importance of setting clear expectations, conducting regular meetings, and ensuring alignment on service readiness prior to deployment.

Summarize your relevant experience, demonstrating how it aligns with Dremio’s goals. Discuss your passion for reliability engineering, your collaborative spirit, and your commitment to continuous improvement as key aspects that would contribute to the SRE team’s success.