Job Summary

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) — Polyphonic Platform

About the Role

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness of Polyphonic on Azure. In this role, you will ensure the service runs dependably at scale while enabling our engineering teams to deliver features quickly and safely. You will apply an automation-first, data-driven approach to operational excellence, bridging engineering, product, security, and business stakeholders.

If you thrive on building resilient systems, eliminating toil through automation, and turning incidents into lasting improvements, we would like to hear from you.

Location & Type

• Team: Platform / Reliability Engineering
• Reports to: Engineering Manager, SRE
• Employment Type: Full-time

Key Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

Availability & Reliability

• Define and own SLOs and SLIs for key user journeys, including request latency, error rate, and successful job completion.
• Design and operate fault-tolerant architectures using Availability Zones and multi-region deployments, graceful degradation, and automated failover.

Monitoring, Observability & Alerting

• Build and maintain end-to-end observability across metrics, logs, distributed traces, and dashboards.
• Implement meaningful, low-noise alerts with clear escalation paths and runbooks to minimize time-to-resolution.

Incident Management & Resilience Engineering

• Lead incident response, including triage, mitigation, and blameless post-incident reviews.
• Drive improvements that reduce incident recurrence and mean time to recovery (MTTR).

Automation & Infrastructure as Code

• Deliver and maintain Infrastructure as Code for provisioning and configuration (ARM templates, Bicep, Terraform, or equivalent).
• Automate operational tasks including deployments, runbook execution, scaling actions, routine maintenance, and recovery.

CI/CD & Change Management

• Integrate reliability guards into pipelines through automated testing, canary rollouts, feature flags, and progressive delivery.
• Ensure safe, auditable change processes with reliable rollback capabilities.

Performance & Capacity Planning

• Monitor capacity and lead proactive scaling and optimization to meet demand and SLOs.
• Conduct load and chaos testing to validate system behavior under stress.

Security & Compliance

• Partner with security teams to enforce least-privilege access, secrets management, and secure configuration baselines.
• Monitor for suspicious activity and support audits, logging, and retention policies required for compliance.

Data Protection, Backups & Disaster Recovery

• Define backup and restore policies, test restores regularly, and maintain a tested DR plan aligned to RTO and RPO targets.

Cost Management

• Monitor and optimize Azure spend through right-sizing, Azure Reservations and Savings Plans, lifecycle policies, and architectural choices.

Platform & Tooling

• Provide self-service platform components, templates, and libraries such as infrastructure modules and observability presets.
• Maintain shared tooling (deployment helpers, CLIs, observability presets) to reduce developer toil.

Documentation & Knowledge Sharing

• Maintain runbooks, run-decks, architecture diagrams, and onboarding documentation.
• Train product and engineering teams on operational best practices.

Stakeholder Communication

• Serve as the bridge between engineering, product, security, and business stakeholders for operational readiness and incident communications.

Skill Requirements

Required Qualifications

• Strong understanding of systems and distributed systems, with hands-on Azure operational experience.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD tooling.
• Expertise in observability tooling and incident management.
• An automation-first mindset backed by solid scripting and programming skills.
• Strong collaboration and stakeholder communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating high-availability, multi-region services on Azure at scale.
• Familiarity with progressive delivery techniques (canary rollouts, feature flags).
• Experience designing and validating disaster recovery plans against defined RTO/RPO targets.
• Track record of reducing operational cost through architectural and capacity optimization.

Other Requirements

Success Metrics

Performance in this role is measured by:

• SLO attainment — percentage of time SLOs are met.
• MTTD & MTTR — mean time to detection and mean time to recovery.
• Incident volume & severity — trending downward over time.
• Deployment frequency — high frequency with a low rollback rate.
• Cost efficiency — cost per unit of work or per active user trending stable or downward.
• Provisioning speed — time to provision new environments (developer velocity).
• Automation coverage — ratio of automated runbook actions to manual interventions.