Senior Staff Software Engineer - Site Reliability Engineering

Senior Staff Software Engineer - Site Reliability Engineering

Location: Reno, NV; San Ramon, CA

Are you passionate about building systems that make reliability a competitive advantage? Do you enjoy combining hands-on engineering with cross-team influence to improve how organizations operate at scale? Do you thrive in fast-paced environments where you can tackle ambiguity, reduce toil, and experiment with AI-powered tooling? If so, we invite you to join our innovative Site Reliability Engineering team at Ridgeline.

 

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Ridgeline, you’ll be part of a hands-on, strategic team responsible for scaling reliability across our cloud-native platform. You’ll design and improve systems like Health Manager, Incident Command, and observability infrastructure—while also driving forward FinOps tooling and AI-assisted automation that reduce operational burden and surface critical insights. This role is central to Ridgeline’s mission of delivering high-performance, zero-downtime services with speed, clarity, and confidence—and your work will directly empower product, infrastructure, and customer-facing teams to move faster without sacrificing reliability.

 

You must be work authorized in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship.

What will you do?

• Build and evolve systems like Health Manager, Incident Command, and observability platforms that support zero-downtime deployments and operational readiness
• Partner with development and infrastructure teams to embed reliability into services and processes
• Participate in the SRE on-call rotation and lead incident response as needed
• Design metrics, tooling, and workflows that enable zero-downtime deployments, fast detection, and proactive issue resolution
• Develop and maintain FinOps tooling to drive cost visibility, usage transparency, and financially-informed engineering decisions
• Lead incident triage and retrospectives with a blameless, data-driven approach
• Define observability signals that make system health visible, actionable, and reliable
• Write production-quality code and ship real improvements—measured by impact, not just effort
• Drive initiatives that reduce risk, increase visibility, or improve operational resilience across services
• Foster an outcomes-focused team culture through honest communication, clarity, and accountability
• Think creatively, own problems, seek solutions, and communicate clearly along the way
• Contribute to a collaborative environment rooted in learning, teaching, and transparency

 

Desired Skills and Experience

• 10+ years in software engineering position or similar function, with experience operating large-scale, mission-critical systems
• Proficiency in one or more of: Kotlin, Java, JavaScript, Python
• Experience with observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus) and monitoring best practices
• Strong familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CDKTF) and CI/CD systems
• Experience leading or participating in incident response and service ownership
• Experience deploying, monitoring, and maintaining multi-tenant architectures
• Ability to work effectively across teams and communicate technical concepts with clarity
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially in facilitating incident response and working sessions with service teams
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and working toward measurable outcomes
• Proven ability to balance individual contribution with cross-functional impact
• Experience or interest in FinOps, cost-aware system design, or cloud usage optimization is a plus
• Familiarity with AI-assisted tooling or workflows is a plus, but not required
• Willingness to learn about cutting-edge technologies while cultivating expertise in a business domain/problem space.
• An aptitude for problem solving
• Ability to communicate effectively
• Serious interest in having fun at work

 

Who You Are

• A systems thinker who brings clarity and direction to complex, ambiguous environments
• A strong communicator who can model transparency, collaboration, and constructive disagreement
• An engineer who delivers—not just ideas, but real improvements that teams rely on
• Passionate about outcomes, not just effort—you prioritize what matters and follow through
• Committed to enabling others by reducing friction, building shared tooling, and simplifying operations
• Comfortable offering candid feedback and engaging in disagreement with respect and clarity—then committing fully once a decision is made, aligning with the team to drive results