Principal SRE

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 10+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations, experience with hyperscalers preferred.
• Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems, including experience establishing operational procedures or runbooks and bringing others up to speed on them.

Technical Skills

• 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 required; comfortable operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces).
• Experience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform).

• Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
• Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA’s.
• Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• 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).

• Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
• Collaborate with engineering on overall storage design, performance expectation against product SLAs.
• Define the monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
• Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.

• Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
• Work with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products.
• Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
• Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.

• Lead cross functional teams to identify gaps in observability, operations process and define overall prioritization strategy.
• Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing those improvements.
• Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.

• Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
• Competitive compensation and 401K
• RSU grants for full-time employees
• ESPP program
• Flexible vacation policy
• Maternity & paternity leave
• MacBook Pro to use for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation
• Childcare bonus (human children only)
• Fertility treatment and support
• Learning & development program
• Commuter benefits
• Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.

The pay range for this position is $215,000 to $250,000 per year.

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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!