{"id":2834819,"url":"https://alion.io/job/backblaze-principal-sre","title":"Principal SRE","company":{"id":37551,"name":"Backblaze","domain":"backblaze.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/backblaze","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":10,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":61,"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":215000,"max":250000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":250000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Bash","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Configuration Management","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Error Budget","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"ITIL","optional":false},{"name":"Jenkins","optional":false},{"name":"kubectl","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Nomad","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Vault","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-19T03:24:30Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-19","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T06:44:48Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"About Backblaze\n\nBackblaze 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.\nFounded 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.\nBut while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Principal SRE to join our team!\nAbout the Role\nWe 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 be approved to demonstrate strong observability skills, process and service improvement and ability to leverage AI and automation to assist to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand..\nAs a technical leader in Backblaze you will be expected to work across the organisation to achieve our goals. This will include working with our executives and customers. The role will focus long term strategic focus on platform stability.\nKey Responsibilities\nService Reliability & Operations\nOwn the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and accountability for outcomes.\nAbility to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.\nAssist 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.\nParticipate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.\nFollow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).\nArchitect and Design\nDesign automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.\nCollaborate with engineering on overall storage design, performance expectation against product SLAs.\nDefine the monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.\nWork with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).\nWrite scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.\nCollaboration\nPartner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.\nWork with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products.\nWork with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.\nDocument systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.\nContinuous Improvement\nLead cross functional teams to identify gaps in observability, operations process and define overall prioritization strategy.\nIdentify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing those improvements.\nPromote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.\nQualifications\nEducation & Experience\nBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).\n10+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations, experience with hyperscalers preferred.\nExposure to large-scale, production-grade systems, including experience establishing operational procedures or runbooks and bringing others up to speed on them.\nTechnical Skills\nSolid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.\nProven ability to leverage AI tools to improve platform stability and scalability.\nKnowledge of storage systems, performance, sharding and storage algorithms.\nExperience in load balancing services including IPVS.\nSecurity-minded operations (patching, hardening, identifying vulnerabilities).\nFamiliarity with service reliability concepts - monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.\nProficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).\nExperience working with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts required; comfortable operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces).\nExperience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform).\nPreferred Attributes\nExperience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.\nFamiliarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA’s.\nStrong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.\nExperience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).\nAt this point, we hope you’re feeling excited about the job description you’re reading. Even if you don’t meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Learning, developing, and growing are key parts of our culture. We’re eager to meet people who believe in our mission and can contribute to our team in various ways. We want people to feel comfortable expressing their true selves and to come, stay, and do their best work here.\nBackblaze Perks\nHealthcare for family, including dental and vision\nCompetitive compensation and 401K\nRSU grants for full-time employees\nESPP program\nFlexible vacation policy\nMaternity & paternity leave\nMacBook Pro to use for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation\nChildcare bonus (human children only)\nFertility treatment and support\nLearning & development program\nCommuter benefits\nCulture that supports a healthy work-life balance\nPay Transparency\nTo provide greater transparency to candidates, we share pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.\nThe pay range for this position is $215,000 to $250,000 per year.\nAt Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.\nTo understand more about the data we collect and process as part of your application, please view our Backblaze Employee Privacy Notice.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7427,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Apple Macbook","Equity","Flexible vacation policy"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Digital Storage","Cloud Storage & File Sharing","Backup & Disaster Recovery"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-19T05:12:38Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 1 · green card filings: 3","filings_12m":1,"filings_prev_12m":3,"green_card_filings_12m":3,"median_offered_wage_usd":137500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":61,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":250000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/backblaze-principal-sre","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/backblaze-principal-sre.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-22T09:51:56Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":6809,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-23T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":37551},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=37551"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbackblaze-principal-sre"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbackblaze-principal-sre"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbackblaze-principal-sre"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/backblaze-principal-sre\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbackblaze-principal-sre"}]}