Staff Site Reliability Engineer

The Opportunity at Altana

At Altana, we believe that software that ships must be reliable and efficient. As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you will be instrumental in ensuring the availability, performance, and scalability of Altana’s critical production services, with a strong focus on our cloud-native environments and data pipelines. You will apply Google-style SRE principles, embedding reliability into our architecture and operations through automation, proactive monitoring, and a commitment to reducing toil.

You will work hands-on with engineering teams, influencing system design for operability and contributing to the development of robust, self-healing infrastructure. This role emphasizes a deep understanding of observability practices to gain comprehensive insights into system behavior, proactive incident prevention, and efficient incident response. Success will be measured by the resilience of our production systems, the effectiveness of our observability stack, and our continuous improvement in operational efficiency and reliability.

Your Responsibilities

• Reliability Engineering: Champion and implement SRE principles, including establishing and monitoring Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for critical services. Drive initiatives to improve system reliability, availability, performance, and efficiency.
• Observability & Monitoring: Design, implement, and maintain advanced monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions for our cloud-native applications and infrastructure (e.g., Kubernetes, microservices). Develop dashboards, alerts, and runbooks that provide deep insights into system health and behavior.
• Automation & Toil Reduction: Identify and automate repetitive operational tasks and manual processes across our production environment. Develop tools and scripts to enhance system operations, deployment pipelines, and incident response.
• Incident Management & Postmortems: Actively participate in the incident response lifecycle, including detection, triage, mitigation, and resolution of production issues. Lead thorough blameless postmortems to identify root causes and implement preventative measures and lasting improvements.
• System Design & Optimization: Collaborate closely with development teams to influence the design of new services, ensuring they are built for operability, reliability, and cost-efficiency. Proactively identify and address performance bottlenecks and architectural weaknesses.
• On-Call Rotation: Participate in a periodic on-call rotation, responding to critical alerts and ensuring rapid resolution of production incidents.
• Data Reliability: Implement and maintain reliability and observability for critical data pipelines and data infrastructure, ensuring data integrity, availability, and timely processing.

About You

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, or equivalent role focusing on production system reliability and operations.
• Strong understanding and practical application of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, including SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, and blameless culture.
• Expertise in designing, implementing, and managing observability platforms for cloud-native environments (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK stack, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger).
• Proficiency in at least one programming/scripting language (e.g., Python, Go) for automation and tool development.
• Extensive hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including their compute, networking, and database services.
• Demonstrated experience with containerization technologies (Docker) and container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation) for managing cloud resources.
• Proven experience participating in and improving incident management processes for critical systems.
• Knowledge of modern software delivery paradigms, including microservices architectures and CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and troubleshooting skills in complex distributed systems.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering teams.
• Experience with data engineering concepts, including building or operating reliable data pipelines, data streaming technologies, or managing large-scale data infrastructure.

This role can be based in New York City, or the San Francisco Bay Area with an expectation of occasional travel as needed.

US Salary Range and Benefits

$170,000 - $220,000

 The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position.  The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.

Equal Opportunity Statement

At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.

Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process.