Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Role Overview

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) on Block’s SRE team, you will proactively and reactively improve the reliability of Block’s platform and critical infrastructure. The role is metrics-driven and systems-oriented, with a focus on distributed platforms and building AI-enabled tooling for observability, incident detection/response, and automation.

Responsibilities

• Improve reliability of platform and Tier 0 (most critical) services through proactive and reactive work.
• Lead incident command during high-severity events (sev 0–1), coordinating mitigation and escalation.
• Serve as primary oncall for Tier 0 services (12 hours/day, about one week every few weeks depending on team size).
• Build and extend reliability platforms and standardize reliability tools across teams.
• Triage, coordinate, and lead stabilization during sev 0–1 incidents.
• Drive platform-wide reliability improvements, including shared operational tooling and deploy-safety patterns.
• Use AI-driven systems to improve signal detection, reduce alert noise, and accelerate root cause analysis.
• Design and implement safe deployment patterns (e.g., progressive delivery, automated rollback, guardrails).
• Create and maintain evidence-based maturity assessments using trailing 90-day data windows.
• Manage vendor/dependency escalation contacts with fast response expectations (reachable within ≤ 5 minutes).

Requirements

• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Experience with production oncall for high-availability systems.
• Strong incident management skills: structured triage, mitigation under pressure, and blameless postmortems.
• CI/CD fluency, progressive rollout strategies, and rollback automation.
• Monitoring & observability expertise, including alert tuning for uptime, error rates, latency regressions, and resource exhaustion.
• Demonstrated initiative and leadership on prior projects, especially with backend/platform focus.
• Comfort reaching for AI to accelerate problem-solving and reduce toil.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with AI-driven tooling for observability, incident analysis, or automation.
• Technical initiative with systems that have many moving parts and strong root-cause ownership.
• Experience with evidence-based reliability program management.

On-Call

• Primary platform oncall is 12 hours per day, roughly one week every few weeks (team-dependent).