Staff Software Engineer, Reliability at Metropolis in Seattle, Washington, United States

Job description

• Metropolis is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on Reliability to own reliability across the entire Metropolis platform and drive the comprehensive practices that ensure system availability, resilience, and observability for our mission-critical mobility infrastructure. In this role, you will build reliability from first principles, architecting failover systems, implementing chaos engineering, and improving our observability foundation to maintain 99.9%+ uptime as we scale to new markets.
• As the technical owner of our reliability posture, you will tackle challenges like external service failover, dependency mirroring, and database replication, working alongside highly technical teams across the organization to influence architecture decisions and establish company-wide reliability standards. You will join the Product Foundations team, playing a key role in building the foundational infrastructure that powers the future of mobility commerce.

Responsibilities

• Own the overall reliability posture for the Metropolis platform, establishing practices, metrics, and systems that ensure 99.9%+ uptime across all services
• Design and implement automatic failover mechanisms for critical external dependencies like Twilio for SMS/voice and Stripe for payments with circuit breakers, retry policies, and degraded mode operations
• Architect and build active-passive or active-active regional deployment strategies with database replication, automated failover, and DNS-based traffic routing including disaster recovery planning and testing
• Establish comprehensive monitoring using Datadog for APM, logs, and metrics correlation
• Implement synthetic monitoring, SLO-based alerting, on-call rotation, and escalation policies while building service health dashboards that show customer impact
• Own the incident management process including workflows, tooling, post-mortem culture, runbook automation, and MTTR reduction initiatives to drive down mean time to recovery from detection to resolution
• Drive adoption of resilience patterns across all services including health checks, graceful degradation, feature flags, rate limiting, backpressure mechanisms, and chaos engineering practices
• Build and maintain local mirrors for critical dependencies with artifact caching, dependency pinning, and vulnerability scanning to prevent build failures from upstream outages

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience including software engineering, reliability engineering, SRE practices, or production operations at scale
• Demonstrate expert-level reliability engineering skills including hands-on experience with multi-region architectures, failover automation, circuit breakers, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery
• Utilize production observability expertise with deep experience implementing monitoring, alerting, tracing, and logging systems at scale – specifically Datadog or similar APM platforms in high-load environments
• Apply strong systems thinking with proven ability to design resilient distributed systems that gracefully handle failures, network partitions, and external dependency outages
• Demonstrate database and data systems knowledge including replication strategies, backup/restore procedures, connection pooling, query optimization, and experience with both relational and NoSQL databases
• Leverage cloud platform expertise with production experience operating and ensuring reliability of systems on AWS including multi-region deployments, load balancing, and DNS-based failover
• Possess experience with AI-powered development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar agentic coding tools for enhanced productivity – context engineering in particular
• Exhibit excellent technical communication with ability to influence technical decisions across teams, document complex systems, conduct post-mortems, and establish reliability standards organization-wide
• Demonstrate expert-level Java and/or Scala proficiency with strong understanding of JVM performance, concurrency, and operational characteristics
• Bring Scala experience
• Possess SRE or Reliability Engineering experience at companies known for operational excellence such as Google, Amazon, Netflix or high-growth startups where you built reliability practices from the ground up
• Demonstrate incident response leadership including experience building incident management processes, conducting blameless post-mortems, and driving MTTR reduction initiatives in production environments
• Utilize chaos engineering experience with tools like Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, or similar, including designing and executing game days and failure injection testing
• Exhibit performance optimization experience with profiling, benchmarking, capacity planning, and system tuning at hyperscale including experience optimizing for high-throughput, low-latency systems
• Show open source contributions or technical blog writing that demonstrates depth of expertise in reliability engineering, distributed systems, or production operations

Skills

Required

• Reliability engineering
• SRE practices
• Multi-region architectures
• Failover automation
• Circuit breakers
• Chaos engineering
• Disaster recovery
• Observability
• Monitoring
• Alerting
• Tracing
• Logging

Preferred

• Scala
• Incident response leadership
• Blameless post-mortems
• MTTR reduction
• Performance optimization
• Profiling
• Benchmarking
• Capacity planning

Benefits

• You will play a key role in building and maintaining this culture as our organization grows. The anticipated base salary for this position is $203,500 USD to $248,500 USD annually.
• The actual base salary offered is determined by a number of variables, including, as appropriate, the applicant's qualifications for the position, years of relevant experience, distinctive skills, level of education attained, certifications or other professional licenses held, and the location of residence and/or place of employment.
• Base salary is one component of Metropolis' total compensation package, which may also include access to or eligibility for healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, short-term and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, a lucrative stock option plan, bonus plans, and more. #LI-LR1 #LI-Onsite