Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Checkr’s mission is to build a fairer future by designing technology to create opportunities for all. We believe all candidates, regardless of who they are, should have a fair chance to work. Established in 2014 and valued at $5B, Checkr is using technology to bring hiring to the next level. Our People Trust Platform uses machine learning to help thousands of companies modernize their background check process and make hiring safer, more efficient, and more inclusive. Some of our customers include Uber, Instacart, Doordash, Netflix, Compass Group, and Adecco.

A career with Checkr is an opportunity to work with some of the best and brightest minds, disrupt an industry for a better future, and give otherwise overlooked candidates access to employment. Checkr has been recognized in Forbes Best Startup Employers and is a top Y Combinator company by valuation.

We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). The Staff SRE must have extensive observability and mentorship experience to help:

•  Lead the administration of tools like DataDog, Sentry, and PagerDuty
•  Identify strategies to improve our full-stack telemetry and monitoring capabilities
•  Mentor other SREs who contribute to observability-related work
•  Help drive team objectives, goals, and key performance metrics

SREs work cross-functionally with Core Infrastructure, Platform, and Product Engineering combining operations work with software engineering principles to enable high-availability of Checkr’s production systems. You will serve as a partner to our Product Engineering teams to help make their services more performant, scalable, observable, and reliable. We believe every engineering team at Checkr should be responsible for the software they build, and SREs play a critical part in providing the tools, practices, and expertise to make that happen.

We are growing and evolving the SRE team to help meet Checkr’s product-first reliability goals for 2023 and beyond. Having established a strong foundation– including a containerized microservices architecture (AWS, Kong, Kubernetes, Kafka, MySQL, and MongoDB), CI/CD, full-stack monitoring, structured incident response, and a blameless postmortem culture--we are focused on implementing new capabilities like:

• Automating observability and alerting across an ever-changing landscape of microservices
• Automated Service Reliability Scorecards and Production Readiness Standards
• Help drive organizational maturity by evolving and improving reliability and software engineering best practices
• Software engineering project work, proposed and driven by individual SRE team members, to remove operational bottlenecks and increase velocity in ways we’ve never considered before

Responsibilities:

• Expand and improve our observability and monitoring footprint
• Collaborate with the engineering manager, product managers, other SREs, and cloud infrastructure engineers to create architectural plans, define project requirements, and establish technical standards
• Connect with non-engineering business units across the organization to better our understanding of the needs and requirements of reliability and the incident management process for Checkr and our customers
• Pair program with team members, review merge requests, help engineers get unblocked, and provide peer mentoring
• Improve common operational challenges by building tools and automating scripts
• Serve as the on-call incident commander to help debug and drive resolution of reliability issues, contribute to the postmortem, and work to prevent recurrence
• Participate in design and production reviews for new features, products, and infrastructure
• Audit and tune the configuration of systems owned by other engineering teams
• Plan for the growth of Checkr’s infrastructure and infrastructure reliability/resiliency

What you bring:

• Combination of experience in both software engineering and operations 
• 7+ years working in a relevant role, including 3+ years of technical leadership experience mentoring junior engineers
• 3+ years of experience architecting and administrating observability stacks, either managed or self-hosted (e.g. DataDog, New Relic, Prometheus, Elastic Stack/ELK)
• Operation of containerized microservices running on public cloud, asynchronous event processing, and databases 
• Strong command of Linux, Git and CI/CD pipelines
• On-call support of highly available production systems 
• Design and build new tools to automate repetitive tasks, prevent incidents or improve TTR using an object oriented programming language such as Python
• Infrastructure as Code