Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Varo
$180-220k
Fee-free online banking platform
Open for applications
Fee-free online banking platform
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$180-220k
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To improve the financial health of our customers through better technology and total transparency.
Role
Who you are
- Minimum 12 years experience as a Site Reliability, DevOps, or Software Engineer with proficiency in one or more high-level languages (such as Python, GoLang, Ruby, Java, or JavaScript) required
- Proven leadership with demonstrated experience in SRE team settings, with a focus on driving and architecting projects
- Expert Linux and troubleshooting skills
- Experience in building and supporting high-availability cloud environments in AWS
- Expertise using Infrastructure as code (IaC) and deployment automation with tools such as Terraform, Helm, Gitlab or equivalent
- Experience running Kubernetes and Istio in production
- Advanced Observability skills with monitoring, logging and tracing tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger/Tempo, ELK/Loki, and OpenTelemetry
- Experience instrumenting code (Java/Kotlin, Python, Go, etc.) and creating simple instrumentation frameworks for developers to adopt where auto instrumentation may fall short
- Participate in an on-call rotation for after-hours production infrastructure incidents
- Experience with SDLC, CI/CD, and related tooling
- Kafka and message streaming experience is a plus
What the job involves
- Varo’s SRE team is well established, designing, building, and running large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant systems that power most of Varo's operations. We live and breathe AWS and Kubernetes, having an open source first and result oriented mindset
- We are an automation and observability focused team and we strive to automate ourselves out of manual / remedial tasks. We monitor and create dashboards to promote a data-driven approach to scale out our platform
- On a typical day, members of our team are hands-on scaling-out production infrastructure, building out CI/CD pipelines, and brainstorming with developers on how to make things better. We collectively strive to build and maintain a rapid-feedback platform that enables our engineers to accomplish their own goals instead of creating friction
- As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will be playing a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our cloud-based services. You will drive best practices and contribute to both the design and implementation of robust cloud infrastructures as well as actively participate in shaping the technical roadmap
- Lead and mentor a team of SREs, driving best practices and fostering a culture of reliability and performance
- Provide strategic direction in the design, implementation, and management of scalable and resilient cloud based infrastructure on AWS
- Oversee the implementation and optimization of observability solutions using OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing and monitoring
- Supervise the utilization of Prometheus and Grafana for effective monitoring and visualization system metrics and health
- Manage the design and implementation of service meshes with Istio to ensure secure and reliable service communication
- Develop and enforce SRE best practices, including incident response, post-mortem analysis and capacity planning. Help lead high-profile incidents and facilitate a blameless culture
- Collaborate with development teams and service owners to ensure alignment with reliability and performance goals
- Contribute to the technical roadmaps and Objective and Key Results (OKRs) by providing leadership and insights on improving system reliability, scalability, and performance
- Write and maintain infrastructure as code for core systems (terraform, terraform modules and kubernetes helm charts); build and maintain CI/CD pipelines
- Collaborate with development teams to implement and improve SLIs and SLOs for their services and to promote service ownership. Use monitoring data to drive actionable insights and contribute to incident response strategies
- Automate operational tasks to save time and improve accuracy
- Write clean and scalable scripts, software and systems to manage platform infrastructure and applications
Our take
The traditional banking system leaves many US citizens underserved, with some minority groups struggling to access accounts. Varo is one of many companies offering no-fee, high-interest accounts, as it takes on the traditional banks - with additional features such as a rewards program and access to early paychecks.
With many young customers distrustful of traditional banks, Varo has capitalised on this sentiment and grown to serve more than 7 million customers. It has a number of competitors such as Chime and Step, and it's also in competition with established traditional brick-and-mortar banks. However, as the first consumer fintech to be granted a national bank charter in the US, the company is at the front of the fintech revolution with a path to future success.
In response to economic uncertainty, the bank was forced to take cost-reduction measures throughout 2022. The effect has been positive, with a drastic reduction in its burn rate, which had been a primary concern. One point of interest is a shift in marketing strategy that has seen Varo focus more on growing the number of customers using it as their main bank, as opposed to growing overall user numbers. The company also has a new tech unit named "Varo Tech".
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-12% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Feb 2025
$29m
SERIES G
Feb 2023
$50m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.1bn
Company benefits
- Health, dental, vision insurance
- Free life coaching and counseling
- 401k
- Office snacks and drinks
- Flexible PTO
- Company and team outings
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Colin Walsh
(CEO)Former EVP at American Express. Has also worked in banking at Wells Fargo, Visa, Executive Networks, and Lloyds.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 11 more jobs at Varo