Senior Site Reliability Engineer I

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at Braze are responsible for keeping all internal-facing services and platforms running smoothly, ensuring consistent system reliability and maximum infrastructure uptime. SREs blend the roles of sensible system administrators and software engineers, applying sound engineering principles, operational discipline, and mature automation to our production environments. We specialize in distributed systems, operating at an extraordinary scale that includes serving over 3.3 billion monthly active users, collecting hundreds of billions of data points each month, and delivering billions of messages to our customers' end-users daily.

This Senior SRE role is specifically focused on supporting the Braze Ruby on Rails monolith and our growing fleet of Go API services. This position is embedded with product engineering teams who own APIs, taking their high-level feature requirements and helping translate them into reliable, highly scalable technology stacks. You will be responsible for the ingress fleets and API ingestion layers which serve as the main entry point for how the entire internet talks to Braze. Because of the highly operational and foundational nature of these ingress fleets, a deep, hands-on experience of both NGINX and Kubernetes is important.

Lead NGINX & Kubernetes Ingress Infrastructure

• →Architect and Operate Ingress Fleets: Configure, tune, and operate Braze's high-performance NGINX routing, proxying, and ingress controller layers that manage massive, real-time API ingestion traffic
• →Own and Expand Scaling Routines: Own, expand, and tune automated scaling routines for our high-throughput, API-based services, leveraging RED (Request, Error, Duration) metrics, Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPA), and customized scaling policies to ensure seamless traffic handling under extreme spikes

Partner with Product Teams on Resilient Architectures

• →Translate Product Requirements: Partner directly with product engineering teams owning API features to translate product requirements into resilient, highly available, and scalable technology stacks
• →Manage SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets: Establish meaningful Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for API services, helping teams navigate error budgets to balance rapid feature deployment with stability
• →Systems Design & Capacity Planning: Conduct in-depth systems design, bottleneck profiling, and capacity planning to ensure Braze meets its strict enterprise-grade SLAs

Incident Response & On-Call Excellence

• →Proactive On-Call Rotation: Participate in a PagerDuty on-call rotation, utilizing shifts not just to resolve structural alerts, but to update runbooks and proactively prevent incidents from recurring
• →Blameless Retrospectives: Lead root-cause analysis (RCA) and blameless retrospectives for availability and performance incidents, translating operational learnings into permanent system improvements

Required Experience & Skills:

• Professional Experience: 5+ years of experience as a DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineer in a high-scale production environment
• NGINX Mastery: Deep hands-on experience configuring, troubleshooting, and operating high-performance NGINX proxying, routing, and ingress controller layers under heavy traffic loads
• Kubernetes Orchestration: In-depth, hands-on proficiency with Kubernetes administration, cluster networking, container orchestration, cluster scheduling, and container deployment
• Linux Fundamentals: Excellent, OS-level understanding of Linux/Unix internals, including disk I/O, memory allocation, TCP/IP networking, and process management
• Programming Proficiency: Strong programming/scripting skills—Ruby and/or Go preferred (or equivalent languages like Python, Java) to build custom automated tools, scripting, and platform frameworks
• Infrastructure as Code: Experience managing infrastructure using IaC technologies such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or similar frameworks
• Systems Thinking: Strong conceptual understanding of systems design—interfaces, boundaries, failure modes, edge cases, and cascading effects across distributed architectures
• Collaborative Mindset: Excellent documentation practices and a high comfort level collaborating asynchronously across remote-first, global engineering teams

Preferred / Nice to Have:

• Data Technologies: Familiarity with data-tier architectures in our stack, including Redis, Kafka, Postgres, or MongoDB
• Observability Systems: Experience using monitoring, profiling, and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or similar tools) to narrow in on incidents quickly
• Cloud Infrastructures: Practical experience deploying and managing infrastructure services in major cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)

For candidates based in the United States, the pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $128,842 and $232,200/year with an expected On Target Earnings (OTE) between $144,000 and $258,000/year (including bonus or commission). Your exact offer may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, this role qualifies for a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants of restricted stock (RSUs) so that you will own a piece of our company.

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