Summary

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Block, you will be a key player in maintaining and improving the reliability of our systems. Your primary focus will be on designing, building, and maintaining scalable, reliable infrastructure and services. You will work closely with development and operations teams to ensure high availability, performance, and capacity of our services. As an early hire of this newly formed team, you will have a significant role in building the foundation that will keep Block's infrastructure reliable for years to come.

Work from anywhere: This role can be performed from any location in North America.

You Will

1. Develop and implement strategies for improving system reliability and performance.
2. Design, build, and maintain scalable and reliable infrastructure using AWS and Kubernetes.
3. Troubleshoot and debug complex issues in a distributed environment.
4. Collaborate with development teams to promote best practices for reliability, scalability, and performance.
5. Conduct root cause analysis of incidents and implement preventive measures.
6. Monitor system performance and capacity, proactively identifying and addressing potential issues.
7. Mentor and provide guidance to junior SREs and other team members.
8. Participate in on-call rotations to provide 24/7 support for critical systems.
9. Continuously improve processes and tools to enhance system reliability and operational efficiency.

You Have

1. 12+ years of experience in site reliability engineering or a related field.
2. Extensive experience with AWS, including services such as EC2, S3, RDS, and Lambda.
3. Strong expertise in Kubernetes and container orchestration.
4. Proven experience in designing, building, and maintaining highly available and scalable systems.
5. Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills, with a focus on root cause analysis.
6. Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Go, or Java.
7. Experience with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
8. Solid understanding of monitoring and observability tools, such as Datadog.
9. Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
10. Ability to mentor and lead junior team members.

Nice to Have

1. Experience with CI/CD pipelines and tools such as Jenkins, GitLab, or BuildKite.
2. Knowledge of security best practices and tools.
3. Experience with database management and optimization.
4. Familiarity with service mesh architectures, such as Istio or Linkerd.
5. Understanding of networking concepts and protocols.

Block takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. U.S. locations are categorized into one of four zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future.

To find a location’s zone designation, please refer to this resource. If a location of interest is not listed, please speak with a recruiter for additional information. 

Zone A:

$263,600—$395,400 USD

Zone B:

$263,600—$395,400 USD

Zone C:

$263,600—$395,400 USD

Zone D:

$263,600—$395,400 USD

Skills

• Development
• Java
• Python
• Software Engineering
• Team Collaboration