Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

United States (Remote)

 

Join us in bringing joy to customer experience.  Five9 is a leading provider of cloud contact center software, bringing the power of cloud innovation to customers worldwide.   

Living our values everyday results in our team-first culture and enables us to innovate, grow, and thrive while enjoying the journey together. We celebrate diversity and foster an inclusive environment, empowering our employees to be their authentic selves. 

We are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our team and help build and maintain highly reliable, scalable systems. This role combines software engineering and operations expertise to ensure our services meet ambitious reliability targets while enabling rapid development and deployment.

This position requires approximately 50% software development and 50% operational work, focusing on automation, monitoring, and system reliability rather than manual operations. The team works collaboratively with our platform, application and database teams to provide a reliable and available service.

Key Responsibilities

Observability & Monitoring (25%)

• Dashboards & Metrics: Design and implement comprehensive dashboards. These dashboards cover basis OS/platform level monitoring and application-level monitoring. These dashboards are broken into primary (RED) and secondary indicators (USE).
• Availability & Reliability: Establish and maintain SLIs (Service Level Indicators), SLOs (Service Level Objectives), and error budgets for the service.
• Performance Monitoring: Build alerting systems and performance monitoring to proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact users
• Incident Response: Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response efforts, including post-mortem analysis and remediation. Maintain the official on-call routing.

Infrastructure Automation & Deployment (25%)

• CI/CD Pipeline Management: Maintain continuous integration and deployment pipelines working with our cloud and on-premise deployment teams.
• Infrastructure as Code: Develop and maintain infrastructure using tools like Terraform, Ansible, or similar
• Configuration Management: Automate system configuration and ensure consistency across environments

Security & Compliance (15%)

• Security Automation: Implement security scanning, vulnerability management, and compliance monitoring
• Access Control: Maintain proper authentication, authorization, and audit logging systems
• Compliance Reporting: Ensure systems meet regulatory requirements and industry standards
• Security Incident Response: Participate in security incident response and remediation efforts

Cost Optimization (15%)

• Resource Management: Monitor and optimize cloud resource usage and costs
• Capacity Planning: Analyze usage patterns and plan for future capacity needs
• Cost Analysis: Provide recommendations for cost-effective architecture and resource allocation
• Right-sizing: Implement automated scaling and resource optimization strategies

Common Services & Platform Engineering (20%)

• Shared Infrastructure: Build and maintain common services like notification systems, caching layers, and message queues or third-party software stacks.
• Database Operations: Manage database reliability, performance, and scaling (where not handled by dedicated DB teams)
• Service Mesh & Networking: Implement and maintain service discovery, load balancing, and network policies
• Developer Tools: Create and maintain tools and platforms that improve developer productivity and system reliability

Required Qualifications

Technical Skills

• Programming Languages: Proficiency in at least two of: Python, Shell, PHP, Java, or similar languages
• Cloud Platforms: Experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure infrastructure and services
• Containerization: Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration
• Monitoring & Observability: Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, or similar tools
• Infrastructure as Code: Proficiency with Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar tools
• Version Control: Expert-level Git usage and collaborative development practices

Operational Experience

• Production Systems: 3+ years managing large-scale production environments
• On-call Experience: Comfortable with 24/7 on-call responsibilities and incident response
• System Administration: Strong Linux/Unix system administration skills
• Networking: Understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, and network security
• Database Systems: Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases in production environments

SRE-Specific Knowledge

• SLI/SLO Management: Experience defining and maintaining service level objectives
• Error Budget Policy: Understanding of error budget concepts and implementation
• Toil Reduction: Track record of identifying and eliminating repetitive manual work
• Capacity Planning: Experience with performance testing and capacity management

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
• Experience with microservices architecture and distributed systems
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance frameworks
• Experience with chaos engineering and reliability testing
• Previous experience in an SRE or DevOps role at a technology company
• Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities

Success Metrics

• Reliability: Maintain or improve service availability and reliability metrics
• Toil Reduction: Measurable reduction in manual operational work through automation
• Incident Response: Effective participation in incident response with focus on prevention
• Code Quality: High-quality, well-tested code contributions to infrastructure and tooling
• Collaboration: Effective partnership with development teams to improve system reliability

Team Culture & Values

• Blameless Post-mortems: Learn from failures without blame or punishment
• Automation First: Prefer automated solutions over manual processes
• Measuring Everything: Data-driven decision making and continuous improvement
• Sharing Knowledge: Document and share expertise across the team
• Work-Life Balance: Sustainable on-call practices and reasonable operational load

Growth Opportunities

• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge infrastructure and reliability challenges
• Exposure to large-scale distributed systems and modern cloud technologies
• Professional development budget for conferences, training, and certifications
• Career progression path toward senior SRE, staff engineer, or management roles
• Collaboration with engineering teams across the organization

 

Work Location: This role is fully remote for candidates who reside outside the 50 mile radius of our San Ramon office.  For candidates who reside within 50 miles of our San Ramon location, this role is Hybrid and would require 3 days a week (M, W, TH) in our San Ramon office. 

 

As part of our continued commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Five9 supports pay transparency during the entire recruitment process.  Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate including, but not limited to: skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the job across the United States. Your recruiter can share more about the specific compensation package during your hiring process.

Additionally, the total compensation package for this position may also include an annual performance bonus, stock, and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans.

Our total reward package also includes:

• Health, dental, and vision coverage, beginning on the first day of employment. Five9 covers 100% of the employee portion of the health, dental and vision coverage and shares a high portion of the dependent cost. We also offer Short & Long-Term Disability, Basic Life Insurance, and a 401k saving plan with employer matching.
• Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources in areas such as: therapy, coaching and self-guided mindfulness exercises for all covered employees and their covered dependents.
• Generous employee stock purchase plan.
• Paid Time Off, Company paid holidays, paid volunteer hours and 12 weeks paid parental leave.

All compensation and benefits are subject to the requirements and restrictions set forth in the applicable plan documents and any written agreements between the parties.

The US base salary range for this role is below.

$91,500 - $219,700 USD

Five9 embraces diversity and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.  The more inclusive we are, the better we are.  Five9 is an equal opportunity employer.