Fast Facts

Join InStride as a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to lead the design of cloud architectures, drive operational excellence, and mentor a growing engineering team while advancing automation and security protocols.

Responsibilities: Design and operate fault-tolerant systems, implement Infrastructure as Code, optimize CI/CD pipelines, and define SLIs/SLOs for operational excellence.

Skills: Expertise in AWS environments, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), security best practices, and programming in Go, Python, or TypeScript.

Qualifications: 10+ years in SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering roles with hands-on experience in AWS and related technologies.

Location: Remote or Los Angeles, CA

Compensation: Not provided by employer. Typical compensation ranges for this position are between $160,000 - $220,000.

What we're looking for:

We’re looking for a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join InStride’s growing engineering team. This is a highly technical role for an individual contributor who thrives at the intersection of cloud architecture, automation, and reliability engineering. You will be the go-to AWS expert for complex initiatives, setting technical direction, and raising the bar for operational excellence across our platform. At InStride, every system you design, every automation you implement, and every safeguard you put in place will directly support our mission of expanding access to life-changing education for working adults around the globe.

Skills we’d love to see you show off:

• Cloud Architecture & Strategy: Design and optimize AWS environments that balance scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency for enterprise workloads.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Serve as a trusted technical advisor, guiding engineers on best practices in Kubernetes, DevSecOps, and AWS-native design patterns.
• Infrastructure as Code Mastery: Build reusable, version-controlled IaC libraries with AWS CDK, Terraform, or CloudFormation to standardize deployments.
• Security & Compliance by Design: Enforce least-privilege IAM, encryption-by-default, and policy-as-code guardrails to meet security and regulatory standards.
• Observability & Reliability Engineering: Define SLIs/SLOs, manage error budgets, and implement monitoring strategies with Prometheus, Grafana, and AWS-native tools.
• CI/CD Excellence: Optimize automated pipelines with Harness and GitHub, enabling faster, safer, and more reliable software delivery.
• Networking & Resilience: Architect secure, performant VPCs, load balancing, and multi-region failover strategies with AWS networking services.
• Automation & Self-Service Enablement: Deliver developer-friendly automation and Internal Developer Portal (IDP) capabilities that empower teams to provision infrastructure without SRE intervention.

Who you are:

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering roles operating production AWS workloads.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS EKS, Kubernetes networking, Helm, autoscaling frameworks (Karpenter/Cluster Autoscaler), serverless architectures, and API Gateways.
• Proven delivery of service mesh solutions (Istio, Linkerd, or AWS App Mesh) for secure and observable service-to-service communication.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using AWS CDK (TypeScript preferred/Python), Terraform, or CloudFormation.
• Strong programming and automation skills in Go, Python, or TypeScript, with additional proficiency in Bash.
• Demonstrated experience implementing policy-as-code with OPA/Rego or similar tooling integrated into CI/CD pipelines.
• Solid understanding of SLI/SLO/error-budget methodologies and hands-on experience with monitoring and alerting stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Groundcover).
• Deep knowledge of AWS security best practices, including IAM policies, encryption, OS hardening, and compliance enforcement.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate reliability metrics into business impact and guide incident/post-mortem discussions.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing enterprise AWS and DevOps strategies without direct management responsibilities.
• Familiarity with Internal Developer Portals (Backstage, Port, Cortex) and self-service automation is a strong plus.

How you will create impact:

• Elevate platform reliability: Design and operate multi-region, fault-tolerant systems that ensure InStride’s learning platform is always available for learners and partners.
• Advance automation at scale: Deliver Infrastructure as Code libraries, CI/CD pipelines, and self-service capabilities that reduce operational toil and accelerate developer productivity.
• Champion security and compliance: Implement defense-in-depth strategies, policy-as-code guardrails, and proactive monitoring to protect sensitive data and maintain trust.
• Drive observability maturity: Define and enforce SLIs/SLOs, establish error-budget policies, and build monitoring frameworks that inform release readiness and operational decisions.
• Enable seamless service connectivity: Deploy and manage service mesh solutions that secure, monitor, and optimize service-to-service communication across Kubernetes workloads.
• Influence technical direction: Partner with engineering and security stakeholders to shape InStride’s AWS strategy, ensuring scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency.
• Mentor and uplift engineers: Share expertise, lead design reviews, and guide teams toward modern DevOps and SRE practices, raising the technical bar across the organization.