Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Ethos is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a technical leader for our SRE organization in the US. In this role, you will help set the technical direction for how Ethos builds, runs, and scales production systems, from our core AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure to the internal platforms and toolchains that power our AI initiatives. This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with organization-wide scope. You will design and build critical infrastructure yourself, lead cross-team initiatives from conception to delivery, and raise the reliability bar across engineering by partnering closely with product teams, up to and including submitting PRs to their codebases. You will work alongside SRE leadership in the US and Bangalore to shape the roadmap, and you will be a go-to technical authority for reliability, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for reliability, infrastructure, and platform tooling; Lead design of complex cross-cutting infrastructure systems and review technical specs; Influence product engineering teams to adopt reliability best practices; Mentor SREs across US and Bangalore teams; Establish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets; Lead high-severity incidents and blameless post-mortems; Lead capacity planning, disaster recovery, and failure-mode testing; Evolve monitoring and alerting strategy; Design, build, and operate AWS infrastructure using Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitOps workflows; Architect governed gateways for AI model routing, access controls, audit trails, and secure data connectors; Ensure security and regulatory compliance through automated scanning, PII guardrails, and scoped data access; Lead cloud cost optimization and FinOps initiatives; Design metering and budgeting for LLM token usage and cost-aware routing; Build internal tools, CI/CD pipelines, and self-service platforms; Identify and automate systemic sources of toil

Requirements

10+ years of full-time software engineering experience in relevant roles (SRE, Infrastructure, Platform, DevOps, or Backend SWE), including significant time operating production systems at scale; A track record of leading complex, multi-team infrastructure or reliability initiatives from ambiguity to delivery, and of influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team; Strong coding skills in Golang, Python, or TypeScript, and a commitment to engineering best practices: design patterns, code reviews, and testing; Deep, hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform; Strong understanding of distributed systems, PostgreSQL, CI/CD systems, and observability tooling such as DataDog; Hands-on experience implementing SLIs/SLOs, leading incident response, and running effective post-mortems; Excellent written and verbal communication; A strong desire to remove toil from systems, and the judgment to balance reliability, velocity, and cost

Nice to have

Experience building Kubernetes operators; Experience building or operating LLM toolchains, such as AI gateways, model routing (e.g., Bedrock, Anthropic), and governance frameworks, including PII scanning and audit trails for model interactions; Demonstrated experience leading cloud cost optimization or building usage metering systems; Experience in regulated industries (insurance, fintech, healthcare) or with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2; Experience collaborating with globally distributed teams

Benefits

bonus; equity; benefits