Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Varo is an entirely new kind of bank. All digital, mission-driven, FDIC insured and designed for the way our customers live their lives. A bank for all of us.

Varo’s SRE team is well established, designing, building, and running large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant systems that power most of Varo's operations. We live and breathe AWS and Kubernetes, having an open source first and result oriented mindset.

We are an automation and observability focused team and we strive to automate ourselves out of manual / remedial tasks. We monitor and create dashboards to promote a data-driven approach to scale out our platform. 

On a typical day, members of our team are hands-on scaling-out production infrastructure, building out CI/CD pipelines, and brainstorming with developers on how to make things better. We collectively strive to build and maintain a rapid-feedback platform that enables our engineers to accomplish their own goals instead of creating friction.

Position Overview

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will be playing a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our cloud-based services. You will drive best practices and contribute to both the design and implementation of robust cloud infrastructures as well as actively participate in shaping the technical roadmap. 

What you'll be doing

• Lead and mentor a team of SREs, driving best practices and fostering a culture of reliability and performance
• Provide strategic direction in the design, implementation, and management of scalable and resilient cloud based infrastructure on AWS
• Oversee the implementation and optimization of observability solutions using OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing and monitoring
• Supervise the utilization of Prometheus and Grafana for effective monitoring and visualization system metrics and health
• Manage the design and implementation of service meshes with Istio to ensure secure and reliable service communication
• Develop and enforce SRE best practices, including incident response, post-mortem analysis and capacity planning. Help lead high-profile incidents and facilitate a blameless culture
• Collaborate with development teams and service owners to ensure alignment with reliability and performance goals
• Contribute to the technical roadmaps and Objective and Key Results (OKRs) by providing leadership and insights on improving system reliability, scalability, and performance
• Write and maintain infrastructure as code for core systems (terraform, terraform modules and kubernetes helm charts); build and maintain CI/CD pipelines
• Collaborate with development teams to implement and improve SLIs and SLOs for their services and to promote service ownership. Use monitoring data to drive actionable insights and contribute to incident response strategies.
• Automate operational tasks to save time and improve accuracy
• Write clean and scalable scripts, software and systems to manage platform infrastructure and applications.

You'll bring the following required skills and experiences

• Minimum 12 years experience as a Site Reliability, DevOps, or Software Engineer with proficiency in one or more high-level languages (such as Python, GoLang, Ruby, Java, or JavaScript) required
• Proven leadership with demonstrated experience in SRE team settings, with a focus on driving and architecting projects
• Expert Linux and troubleshooting skills. 
• Experience in building and supporting high-availability cloud environments in AWS
• Expertise using Infrastructure as code (IaC) and deployment automation with tools such as Terraform, Helm, Gitlab or equivalent
• Experience running Kubernetes and Istio in production
• Advanced Observability skills with monitoring, logging and tracing tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger/Tempo, ELK/Loki, and OpenTelemetry
• Experience instrumenting code (Java/Kotlin, Python, Go, etc.) and creating simple instrumentation frameworks for developers to adopt where auto instrumentation may fall short
• Participate in an on-call rotation for after-hours production infrastructure incidents
• Experience with SDLC, CI/CD, and related tooling
• Kafka and message streaming experience is a plus

#MidSenior

We recognize not everyone will have all of these requirements. If you meet most of the criteria above and you’re excited about the opportunity and willing to learn, we’d love to hear from you!

About Varo

Varo launched in 2017 with the vision to bring the best of fintech into the regulated banking system. We’re a new kind of bank – all-digital, mission-driven, FDIC-insured, and designed around the modern American consumer. 

As the first consumer fintech to be granted a national bank charter in 2020, we make financial inclusion and opportunity for all a reality by empowering everyone with the products, insights, and support they need to get ahead. Through our core product offerings and suite of customer-first features, we aim to address a broad range of consumer needs while profitably serving underserved communities that have been historically excluded from the traditional financial system.

We are growing quickly in our hub locations of San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Charlotte along with colleagues located across the country. We have been recognized among Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, Forbes’ Fintech 50, and earned the No. 7 spot on Inc. 5000’s list of fastest-growing companies across the country.

Varo. A bank for all of us.

Our Core Values

- Customers First

- Take Ownership

- Respect

- Stay Curious

- Make it Better

Learn more about Varo by following us:

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/varomoney

Instagram - www.instagram.com/varobank

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/varobank

Varo is an equal opportunity employer. Varo embraces diversity and we are committed to building teams that represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

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