Senior Site Reliability Engineer I

At Braze, we have found our people. We’re a genuinely approachable, exceptionally kind, and intensely passionate crew.

We seek to ignite that passion by setting high standards, championing teamwork, and creating work-life harmony as we collectively navigate rapid growth on a global scale while striving for greater equity and opportunity – inside and outside our organization.

To flourish here, you must be prepared to set a high bar for yourself and those around you. There is always a way to contribute: Acting with autonomy, having accountability and being open to new perspectives are essential to our continued success.

Our deep curiosity to learn and our eagerness to share diverse passions with others gives us balance and injects a one-of-a-kind vibrancy into our culture.

If you are driven to solve exhilarating challenges and have a bias toward action in the face of change, you will be empowered to make a real impact here, with a sharp and passionate team at your back. If Braze sounds like a place where you can thrive, we can’t wait to meet you.

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at Braze are responsible for keeping all internal-facing services and platforms running smoothly, ensuring consistent system reliability and maximum infrastructure uptime.

SREs blend the roles of sensible system administrators and software engineers, applying sound engineering principles, operational discipline, and mature automation to our production environments.

We specialize in distributed systems, operating at an extraordinary scale that includes serving over 3.3 billion monthly active users, collecting hundreds of billions of data points each month, and delivering billions of messages to our customers' end-users daily.

This Senior SRE role is specifically focused on supporting the Braze Ruby on Rails monolith and our growing fleet of Go API services. This position is embedded with product engineering teams who own APIs, taking their high-level feature requirements and helping translate them into reliable, highly scalable technology stacks.

You will be responsible for the ingress fleets and API ingestion layers which serve as the main entry point for how the entire internet talks to Braze. Because of the highly operational and foundational nature of these ingress fleets, a deep, hands-on experience of both NGINX and Kubernetes is important.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Lead NGINX & Kubernetes Ingress Infrastructure

Architect and Operate Ingress Fleets: Configure, tune, and operate Braze's high-performance NGINX routing, proxying, and ingress controller layers that manage massive, real-time API ingestion traffic

Own and Expand Scaling Routines: Own, expand, and tune automated scaling routines for our high-throughput, API-based services, leveraging RED (Request, Error, Duration) metrics, Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPA), and customized scaling policies to ensure seamless traffic handling under extreme spikes

Partner with Product Teams on Resilient Architectures

Translate Product Requirements: Partner directly with product engineering teams owning API features to translate product requirements into resilient, highly available, and scalable technology stacks

Manage SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets: Establish meaningful Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for API services, helping teams navigate error budgets to balance rapid feature deployment with stability

Systems Design & Capacity Planning: Conduct in-depth systems design, bottleneck profiling, and capacity planning to ensure Braze meets its strict enterprise-grade SLAs

Incident Response & On-Call Excellence

Proactive On-Call Rotation: Participate in a PagerDuty on-call rotation, utilizing shifts not just to resolve structural alerts, but to update runbooks and proactively prevent incidents from recurring

Blameless Retrospectives: Lead root-cause analysis (RCA) and blameless retrospectives for availability and performance incidents, translating operational learnings into permanent system improvements

Required Experience & Skills

Professional Experience: 5+ years of experience as a DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineer in a high-scale production environment

NGINX Mastery: Deep hands-on experience configuring, troubleshooting, and operating high-performance NGINX proxying, routing, and ingress controller layers under heavy traffic loads

Kubernetes Orchestration: In-depth, hands-on proficiency with Kubernetes administration, cluster networking, container orchestration, cluster scheduling, and container deployment

Linux Fundamentals: Excellent, OS-level understanding of Linux/Unix internals, including disk I/O, memory allocation, TCP/IP networking, and process management

Programming Proficiency: Strong programming/scripting skills—Ruby and/or Go preferred (or equivalent languages like Python, Java) to build custom automated tools, scripting, and platform frameworks

Infrastructure as Code: Experience managing infrastructure using IaC technologies such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or similar frameworks

Systems Thinking: Strong conceptual understanding of systems design—interfaces, boundaries, failure modes, edge cases, and cascading effects across distributed architectures

Collaborative Mindset: Excellent documentation practices and a high comfort level collaborating asynchronously across remote-first, global engineering teams

Preferred / Nice to Have

Data Technologies: Familiarity with data-tier architectures in our stack, including Redis, Kafka, Postgres, or MongoDB

Observability Systems: Experience using monitoring, profiling, and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or similar tools) to narrow in on incidents quickly

Cloud Infrastructures: Practical experience deploying and managing infrastructure services in major cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)

For candidates based in Canada, the pay range at the start of employment for this position is expected to be between CA$153,815 - CA$277,000/year, with an expected On Target Earnings ( OTE ) between CA$172,000 - CA$308,400/year (including performance-based or variable compensation (bonus or commission).

Your particular offer may vary depending on multiple individual factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, this role qualifies for a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants of restricted stock (RSUs) so that you will own a piece of our company.

WHAT WE OFFER

Braze benefits vary by location, and we encourage you to review our specific benefits offerings for each country here . More details on benefits plans will be provided if you receive an offer of employment.

From offering comprehensive benefits to fostering hybrid ways of working, we’ve got you covered so you can prioritize work-life harmony. Braze offers benefits such as:

Competitive compensation that may include equity

Retirement and Employee Stock Purchase Plans

Flexible paid time off

Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability

Family services that include fertility benefits and equal paid parental leave

Professional development supported by formal career pathing, learning platforms, and a yearly learning stipend