Senior Site Reliability Engineer I

Are you an engineer who gets excited about the challenge of making complex distributed systems observable — not just instrumenting them, but designing the infrastructure that makes traces, metrics, and logs useful at scale? In this role, you will help build and evolve Axon's next-generation observability platform, enabling the entire engineering organization to understand and operate their services with confidence. You'll work across the full observability stack: from distributed tracing adoption (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) to log infrastructure (Loki, Alloy) to metrics (Cortex, Prometheus, Grafana). You'll partner directly with Axon's engineering teams to drive adoption of modern observability practices and build the tooling that makes our platform self-service for the teams that depend on it. You will be part of the Observability team within Axon's Site Reliability organization — a focused team responsible for Axon's metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting infrastructure across dozens of environments globally.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve Axon's distributed tracing infrastructure, including Jaeger and OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation, driving adoption across Axon's service-oriented architecture; Build and operate Axon's log aggregation platform (Grafana Loki + Alloy), expanding use cases beyond Kubernetes event logs and reducing organizational dependency on expensive third-party log tooling (including Splunk); Maintain and improve Axon's metrics infrastructure (Cortex, Prometheus, Grafana) — the foundation for alerting, dashboards, and SLO tracking across all of Axon's environments; Write internal tooling and automation that makes observability self-service: toolkit commands, agentic on-call helpers, runbook generation, and dashboard scaffolding; Manage observability infrastructure as code via Terraform, CDK, ArgoCD, and Helm — including capacity management, cybersecurity requirements and compliance, and on-call rotation participation; Work directly with engineering teams across Axon to define instrumentation standards, drive tracing adoption, and help teams build meaningful SLOs for their services

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an equivalent highly technical field; 7+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering; Experience with agentic AI tooling or building LLM-powered developer tools; Strong Linux systems fundamentals and comfort working in Kubernetes-based environments; Hands-on experience with one or more components of the LGTM stack: Loki, Grafana, Tempo/Jaeger, or Mimir/Cortex; Experience with infrastructure as code — Terraform strongly preferred, CDK is a plus; Experience with any of: Golang, Python, or Java; United States citizen — able to gain CJIS clearance for full US production access

Nice to have

Experience deploying and operating distributed tracing systems (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Tempo, or similar); Familiarity with OpenTelemetry — instrumentation, collectors, and pipelines; Experience with GitOps workflows; Exposure to 24/7 high-volume systems with formal SLA requirements; Ability to debug complex multi-service distributed systems

Benefits

Competitive salary and 401k with employer match; Discretionary time off; Paid parental leave for all; Medical, Dental, Vision plans; Fitness Programs; Emotional & Development Programs; And yes, we have snacks in our offices