Senior Site Reliability Engineer

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Vantage, you'll have a pivotal role in our engineering team. Your main responsibilities will include collaborating closely with product teams on feature discovery and delivery, guiding technical architecture decisions, and ensuring our production infrastructure is designed for scalability and cost efficiency. You will be the go-to person for ensuring reliability and availability, helping our platform grow to meet our customers' needs.

To apply for the Senior Site Reliability Engineer position at Vantage, you should have a strong technical background with at least 8 years of experience in building and operating SaaS products. Expertise in Kubernetes, cloud-hosted network design, and Infrastructure as Code frameworks like Terraform is essential. Additionally, a passion for working with product teams and a commitment to keeping up with emerging SRE trends will be highly valued.

At Vantage, we pride ourselves on cultivating a positive and collaborative work environment. As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will work directly with our founders and engineers, which fosters open communication and teamwork. We believe in providing comprehensive training and resources so that our team can stay current with industry trends and technologies, thus ensuring that everyone feels supported and empowered to contribute effectively.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Vantage, you will be working with cutting-edge technologies, particularly in the areas of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure. You will also engage with Infrastructure as Code frameworks such as Terraform or Pulumi, and utilize observability tools like Datadog to monitor our systems effectively. Being familiar with cloud-hosted network design techniques will also be beneficial in ensuring optimal performance and reliability.

Vantage is in a growth phase, and we anticipate that our team will double in size by 2025, which provides ample opportunities for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to advance their career. You'll have the chance to take on additional responsibilities, lead projects, and contribute to the company’s strategic direction. We're committed to developing our team's skills and expertise, enabling you to grow alongside the company.

In answering this question, showcase specific projects where you've designed cloud networks. Discuss VPC configurations, peering, subnet definitions, and NAT setups. Highlight how your approach ensured both security and efficiency, and how it contributed to the overall reliability of the service.

It's essential to articulate a balanced approach in your answer. Discuss how you use metrics to guide your decisions, ensuring that reliability is not compromised while still delivering new features on time. Mention examples where you've had to make trade-offs and how you successfully communicated these decisions to stakeholders.

Here, focus on tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana. Detail your hands-on experience with implementing monitoring systems in cloud environments, and how they contributed to improving system observability. Share metrics or improvements that resulted from these implementations.

Prepare an example that highlights your problem-solving skills. Walk through the incident from detection to resolution, focusing on how you communicated with your team and what steps were taken to prevent future occurrences. Reflect on any lessons learned and how you applied them to improve processes.

Communicate your commitment to professional development by mentioning conferences, webinars, or certifications that you pursue regularly. Share specific technologies or methodologies you're currently learning and how they could benefit the team at Vantage.

Explain your approach to code reviews, highlighting your focus on collaboration and knowledge sharing. Mention how you ensure that best practices are followed and how this process contributes to overall code quality and team learning.

Describe how you engage with product teams during the entire development lifecycle. Focus on how you address infrastructure needs early, ensuring that reliability specifications are met while also aligning on timelines and priorities. Providing specific examples of successful collaborations can strengthen your answer.

Discuss practices such as using auto-scaling, rightsizing resources, and leveraging spot instances where appropriate. Present any tools or strategies you’ve implemented to monitor and optimize costs effectively in previous operations.

Prepare to discuss the importance of both system reliability and business needs. Talk about your approach to evaluating risks, how you would communicate potential issues to stakeholders, and propose alternative solutions that could satisfy both the feature request and reliability needs.

Express the significant impact of automation on enhancing efficiency and minimizing human error in operations. Provide examples of past automation projects, the tools you used, and the positive outcomes achieved. Emphasize your commitment to identifying and automating repetitive tasks as a key focus.