Hybrid Staff Site Reliability Engineer – Tech Lead

at Unify

• Job title: Staff Site Reliability Engineer – Tech Lead
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $250,000 - $295,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Postgres, Python, TypeScript, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Staff SRE Tech Lead overseeing platform reliability and scalability at Unify. Leading an SRE pod while enhancing infrastructure performance and implementing reliability best practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead the SRE pod: Set technical direction, drive prioritization, and mentor engineers—ensuring the team is tackling the highest-leverage reliability and scalability challenges.
• Scale our data infrastructure: Architect and extend our ClickHouse and PostgreSQL deployments to handle terabytes of new data monthly; designing partitioning strategies, tuning queries, and building resilient replication and failover systems.
• Improve system performance: Profile and optimize critical paths across our backend services, identify bottlenecks in data pipelines and API layers, and ship changes that meaningfully improve latency and throughput.
• Build for reliability: Design and implement rate limiting, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and other patterns that keep the platform stable under load and during partial failures.
• Automate everything: Drive tooling that eliminates toil—automating deployments, scaling operations, backup verification, and incident remediation.
• Instrument and observe: Build out distributed tracing, metrics, and alerting that give engineers clear visibility into system behavior and make debugging production issues fast.
• Define and enforce SLOs: Establish reliability targets aligned with customer needs, manage error budgets, and drive architectural decisions that balance shipping speed with system stability.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend foundation, including 3+ years focused on reliability, infrastructure, or platform work.
• Experience leading teams or pods—setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and driving execution on complex projects.
• Deep expertise operating databases at scale, including schema design, query optimization, replication, and failover strategies.
• Strong programming skills (Typescript, Python, Go, or similar) with a track record of building automation and tooling that meaningfully reduces operational burden.
• Collaborative, low-ego attitude with a history of leveling up the people around you.

Benefits

• Offers Equity