Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

What You'll Do

At Avalara, we are building the global cloud compliance platform, and the Reliability Engineering Cloud Infrastructure Platform team is developing the next generation infrastructure platform that our products and services operate on. Our engineering teams are diverse in their engineering practices, culture, and background. We are building an Infrastructure Platform that aims to reduce friction, increase agility, predictability, and provide the necessary flexibility and control to engineering teams while maintaining a very high operational bar.

As a Reliability Engineer, you will be part of a team responsible for the design, architecture, and operations of our next generation cross platform and multi cloud platform as a service. Our focus is to tap into the power of software engineering for solving technical and organizational problems that concern infrastructure.

This might be a good fit for you, if...

• writing clean, readable, testable, and performant code gives you joy,
• translating unknowns into knowns excites you,
• reading a distributed systems paper is your thing,
• once, twice, automate resonates with you
• releases equals progress to you
  
  
  

Some broad areas of work are...

• Streamlining Kubernetes operations across multiple cloud providers.
• Mature the organization’s tooling to standardize deploy practices and move towards a globally distributed infrastructure.
• Tools and education that will help teams migrate from their existing container ecosystem to Kubernetes.
• Conduct workshops to evangelize and educate about the infrastructure platform.
• Proactively work with other SRE teams within the org to identify potential integration areas that are a source of friction and eliminate them.
  
  
  

Here’s How a Typical Week Looks Like

You will be spending your time in no particular order or ratio on the following...

• Managing/Administering kubernetes related changes across multiple cloud providers.
• Building tools for the cloud infrastructure platform using Golang, Python, or Terraform to automate away things.
• Onboarding feature development teams.
• Troubleshoot and support the platform
  
  
  

What You'll Need to be Successful

You have a background in...

• Networking: A good understanding of the OSI model, TCP/IP, and DNS; particularly as it relates to cloud environments.
• Linux Fundamentals: Solid experience with the administration, security hardening, and performance tuning of one or more distributions of Linux.
• Troubleshooting : A passion for tracking down technical root causes of distributed systems, and software.
• Observability: Experience with developing service level indicators and objectives, instrumenting software, and building alerts.
• Software Engineering: An understanding of software engineering fundamentals with experience developing software with a team of engineers. Strong experience in the practice of testing.
• Automation: A strong desire to automate all of the things and eliminate toil.
• Containers: A solid understanding of the underpinnings of container technology such as cgroups and namespaces.
• Container Orchestration Systems: Experience with the operations, administration, and development of orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, ECS, Mesos, Nomad.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Experience with deploying and maintaining infrastructure as code with tools such as Terraform, Pulumi.
• Technical Writing: Most of the services we develop are greenfield, and you will need to build documentation and diagrams for other engineering teams.
• Customer Satisfaction: Keen eye for customer satisfaction (our customers are other engineering teams and avalara customers).
• Passion for Learning: Interest in the broader technology space with a constant desire to expand your understanding.
• Adaptability: Experience working on a variety of projects. In short, we want people with T-shaped skills.
  
  
  

You stand out from the crowd if you have ...

• Kubernetes: Experience with the operations and administration of Kubernetes
• Go: Experience developing non trivial software with Go
• Distributed Computing: Experience architecting, developing, and deploying distributed services across regions and clouds.
• Technical Writing : writing technical documents that people love and adore.
• Open Source: Build side-projects or contribute to other open-source projects.
  
  
  

Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years experience in a SaaS environment
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or engineering equivalent
• Ability to participate in an on-call rotation
  
  
  

About Avalara

We’re Avalara. We’re defining the relationship between tax and tech.

We’ve already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing nearly 40 billion customer API calls and over 5 million tax returns a year.

Last year, we became a billion-dollar business, and our tribe expanded by a cool thousand people - there’s nearly 5,000 of us now. Our growth is real, and we’re not slowing down - not until we’ve achieved our mission - to be part of every transaction in the world.

We’re bright, innovative and disruptive, like the orange we love to wear. It captures our quirky spirit and optimistic mindset. It shows off the culture we’ve designed, that empowers our people to win. Ownership and achievement go hand in hand here. We instill passion in our people through the trust we place in them.

We’ve been different from day one. Join us, and your career will be too.

EEO Statement

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer. Supporting diversity and inclusion is a cornerstone of our company — we don’t want people to fit into our culture, but to enrich it. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, age, gender, national orientation, disability, sexual orientation, US Veteran status, or any other factor protected by law. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know.