Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

At InStride, people are our purpose. We believe that investing in people is the most powerful way to drive success—for individuals and organizations alike.

As a public benefit corporation, we partner with leading employers to unlock opportunities for their employees, providing access to top-tier education programs that align with their employees' career goals and the company's business goals.

Our mission goes beyond skill-building; we're here to empower our partners' employees to advance their careers, elevate their expertise, and achieve meaningful personal and professional growth.

No matter the team you're on, our dedication to the success of our partners and their employees is what drives us. If you're passionate about making a difference and driving educational and professional advancement, InStride is the place for you.

Candidates must be located in one of the following states to be considered eligible for employment: AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, IL, IN, KS, LA, MD, MA, MI, MO, NV, NH, NJ, NY, PA, OH, OR, TX, VA, WA, WI.

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.

Compensation range: $165,000 - $185,000 USD

We are looking for someone who is not only technically skilled, but also enthusiastic about making a meaningful impact. If this description resonates with you, we're excited about the possibility of having you on our team. As a skills-driven employer, we encourage you to apply if there is a skill-fit, even in the absence of years of experience.

Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At InStride, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you're excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this role!

As an organization that champions investing in people, it's critical we walk the talk. That's why InStride employees are eligible to enroll in 2,800+ online certificate and degree programs through our Step Forward program. Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, InStride covers your tuition upfront, regardless of your course of study, degree type, or school - eligible to employees starting Day 1.

This role is also eligible for the following benefits:

• 401(k) plan with company match
• Flexible vacation policy
• Paid family leave
• Best-in-class health care benefits
• And more!

InStride fosters a culture of belonging, we support authenticity and intersectionality, and we embrace and appreciate our differences. We do this by building a diverse pipeline of talent and ensuring equitable access to opportunities, information and leadership. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let your recruiter know.

InStride recommends employees have their COVID vaccinations. InStride may require employees to have COVID vaccination before entering the office or attending any InStride-related event in the future. However, we do not require this at this time.

For questions on how we use personal information of job applicants, please refer to InStride's Job Applicant Privacy Policy.

Beware of recruiting scams. InStride does not require a financial transaction or any financial account information to be eligible for employment. If you receive a message purporting to be from InStride asking you for a financial transaction, your financial account information, or any other sensitive information, please do not respond and let us know immediately at recruiting@instride.com.

InStride is a human capital management company that helps organizations retain talent, upskill employees, and fill critical workforce roles through education programs