Principal SRE - Backblaze

About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

We’re seeking a Principal SRE to join our team!

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience collaborating in cross-functional teams to manage the design, implementation, and ongoing management of the Backblaze core infrastructure. You will demonstrate strong observability skills, drive process and service improvements, and leverage AI and automation to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand.

As a technical leader at Backblaze, you will be expected to work across the organization to achieve our goals, including working with executives and customers. The role will maintain a long-term strategic focus on platform stability.

Key Responsibilities

Service Reliability & Operations

• Own the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and take accountability for outcomes.
• Work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.
• Assist and advise on the design of service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk; partner with service owners to define/iterate SLIs/SLOs and establish error budget policies and alerting.
• Participate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
• Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).

Architect and Design

• Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
• Collaborate with engineering on overall storage design and performance expectations against product SLAs.
• Define monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
• Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.

Collaboration

• Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
• Work with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products.
• Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
• Document systems, share learnings, and help cultivate a reliability-minded engineering culture.

Continuous Improvement

• Lead cross-functional teams to identify gaps in observability and operational processes, and define an overall prioritization strategy.
• Identify recurring issues, propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing them.
• Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.

Qualifications

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 10+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations; experience with hyperscalers preferred.
• Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems, including experience establishing operational procedures or runbooks and mentoring others on them.

Technical Skills

• Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Proven ability to leverage AI tools to improve platform stability and scalability.
• Knowledge of storage systems, performance, sharding, and storage algorithms.
• Experience in load balancing services, including IPVS.
• Security-minded operations (patching, hardening, identifying vulnerabilities).
• Familiarity with service reliability concepts: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).
• Experience working with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts required; comfortable operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces).
• Experience with HashiCorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform).

Preferred Attributes

• Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
• Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLAs.
• Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

Perks & Benefits

• Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
• Competitive compensation and 401(k)
• RSU grants for full-time employees
• ESPP program
• Flexible vacation policy
• Maternity & paternity leave
• MacBook Pro for work plus a generous workstation personalization stipend
• Childcare bonus (human children only)
• Fertility treatment and support
• Learning & development program
• Commuter benefits
• Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance