Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure
IBM · Posted Oct 15
Hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, enterprise software, quantum computing, and IT consulting services
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About the role
Confluent Cloud is a multi-cloud streaming platform that processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure, and the role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability (CAR-S), a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering. This Staff Site Reliability Engineer position combines hands-on engineering—building automation, analyzing systemic failure patterns, defining SLO/SLA frameworks, and owning Rootly/PagerDuty tooling—with program ownership of incident management, post-mortem coaching, incident commander training, and customer root cause analysis. The role is part of a global follow-the-sun team and focuses on proactive reliability improvements that reduce the need for reactive incident management.
What you will do
- Analyze systemic failure patterns and design improvements that prevent incident recurrence
- Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments
- Build tooling and automation to reduce incident response toil and scale team impact
- Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack
- Analyze reliability data to identify systemic improvements; build dashboards that drive action
- Explore AI-assisted approaches to documentation quality and incident analysis
- Design scalable reliability standards that reduce reactive workload over time.
- Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response
- Serve as an on-call Incident Commander for production incidents, including acting as escalation IC when incidents exceed a team's management chain
- Develop and deliver training programs for engineering teams at all levels
- Coach teams through post-mortems and on developing actionable corrective actions
- Edit and review customer-facing incident documents to ensure quality and clarity
- Drive turnaround SLAs while maintaining technical accuracy
- Ensure clear explanation of what happened, why, and how we'll prevent recurrence
- Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices
- Be the expert who teams proactively engage for guidance
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- 10+ years in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering
- Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, PagerDuty, or similar platforms)
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale—Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems
- Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing—ability to diagnose complex issues
- Kubernetes and container orchestration experience
- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
- Systems thinking: understanding how infrastructure design choices affect failure modes and recovery
- Familiarity with SLO/SLA frameworks.
- Track record as a trusted advisor across engineering organizations
- Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes
- Strong written communication (design docs, one-pagers, runbooks)
- Post-mortem facilitation experience
- Experience with async collaboration across time zones
- Large company experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations
- Multi-cloud experience (minimum 2+ of AWS/GCP/Azure).
- Modern CI/CD, GitHub, AI-assisted workflows—you'll have the freedom to build what you need.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a global technology and consulting company that provides hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and enterprise infrastructure solutions. Operating in over 175 countries, IBM helps businesses across industries modernize operations, secure data, and drive digital transformation through platforms like watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift. Founded over a century ago, the company remains a pioneer in high-performance computing, enterprise automation, and quantum technology.
- Industry
- Information Technology
- Company size
- 260,000+ employees
- Founded
- June 16, 1911
- Location
- Armonk, New York, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Funding
Public Company · $3.5B raised
- ·Post Ipo Debt$150M
Leadership
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer
Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting
Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications
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