Principal SRE

Job description

About Backblaze
Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.
Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.
But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Principal SRE to join our team!
About the Role
We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience collaborating in cross functional teams to manage the design, implementation and ongoing management of the Backblaze core infrastructure. You will be approved to demonstrate strong observability skills, process and service improvement and ability to leverage AI and automation to assist to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand..
As a technical leader in Backblaze you will be expected to work across the organisation to achieve our goals. This will include working with our executives and customers. The role will focus long term strategic focus on platform stability.
Key Responsibilities
Service Reliability & Operations
Own the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and accountability for outcomes.
Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.
Assist and advise on the design of service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk; partner with service owners to define/iterate SLIs/SLOs and establish error budget policies and alerting.
Participate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).
Architect and Design
Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
Collaborate with engineering on overall storage design, performance expectation against product SLAs.
Define the monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.
Collaboration
Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
Work with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products.
Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.
Continuous Improvement
Lead cross functional teams to identify gaps in observability, operations process and define overall prioritization strategy.
Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing those improvements.
Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.
Qualifications
Education & Experience
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
10+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations, experience with hyperscalers preferred.
Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems, including experience establishing operational procedures or runbooks and bringing others up to speed on them.
Technical Skills
Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
Proven ability to leverage AI tools to improve platform stability and scalability.
Knowledge of storage systems, performance, sharding and storage algorithms.
Experience in load balancing services including IPVS.
Security-minded operations (patching, hardening, identifying vulnerabilities).
Familiarity with service reliability concepts — monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).
Experience working with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts required; comfortable operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces).
Experience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform).
Preferred Attributes
Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA’s.
Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.
Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
At this point, we hope you’re feeling excited about the job description you’re reading. Even if you don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Learning, developing, and growing are key parts of our culture. We’re eager to meet people who believe in our mission and can contribute to our team in various ways. We want people to feel comfortable expressing their true selves and to come, stay, and do their best work here.
Backblaze Perks
Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
Competitive compensation and 401K
RSU grants for full-time employees
ESPP program
Flexible vacation policy
Maternity & paternity leave
MacBook Pro to use for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation
Childcare bonus (human children only)
Fertility treatment and support
Learning & development program
Commuter benefits
Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance
Pay Transparency
To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.
The pay range for this position is $215,000 to $250,000 per year.
At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.
To understand more about the data we collect and process as part of your application, please view our Backblaze Employee Privacy Notice.
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