Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well-known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!

We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.

We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1.

Honeycomb’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team works at the intersection of infrastructure, developer experience, and organizational enablement. We lead technically complex, cross-team projects that improve reliability, scale systems, and make life easier for engineering teams. Our work spans AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Kafka, and other tools, aligned with the sociotechnical needs of scaling a fast-growing company. We’re a collaborative, diverse team that values experimentation, data-driven decisions, and maintaining a safe environment for healthy debate and innovation.

What you’ll do in the role:

• Help Honeycomb scale our backend systems to support our highest-volume customers.
• Build organizational trust through transparent communication, giving and receiving direct and kind feedback.
• Work with other backend teams to dive deep into our stack to make sure we’re getting the most out of our infrastructure.
• Be trained, become, and then train others as an Incident Commander.
• Help SRE and Honeycomb develop a healthy cross-Atlantic engineering culture.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation as the EU side of a new follow-the-sun rotation.
• Help the organization navigate tradeoffs between reliability and its other goals and priorities.
• Optional: act as an external ambassador through blog posts, conference talks, and presentations with support from our DevRel team.

What You’ll Bring:

• Strong experience in AWS and Kubernetes.
• Experience performing cost analysis and reduction.
• Solid Helm, Terraform, and CI/CD experience.
• Project management skills.
• Software engineering experience (Golang is a plus, and so is performance engineering).
• Experience with Kafka or another high-volume distributed system.
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills, with the ability to tailor your communication for your audience and give direct feedback when you notice something wrong.
• A curiosity to learn how people and systems work, and the willingness to make them partners in your initiatives.
• Familiarity with observability concepts (SLOs, instrumentation) and data-driven decision making.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, with a bias for action and experimentation.
• Interest in both the technical and human sides of reliability engineering.
• Experience working in geographically distributed teams.

Base Salary based on level of experience: £127,670 - £150,200 GBP

What you'll get when you join the Hive:

• A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program.
• It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience.
• Time to recharge with unlimited PTO.
• A distributed-first mindset and culture.
• Home office, co-working, and internet stipend.
• Full benefits coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents.
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood.
• Annual development allowance.
• And much more...

Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.

Diversity & Accommodations: We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace—where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We strive to ensure an inclusive experience throughout every stage of our hiring process and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations as needed.