Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Ethos Life
$156-275k
AWS
Kubernetes
TypeScript
Python
Postgres
Terraform
Golang
Datadog
Expert level
Remote from US
Life insurance provider
Be an early applicant
Life insurance provider
501-1000 employees
FintechB2CInsuranceSaaS
Be an early applicant
$156-275k
AWS
Kubernetes
TypeScript
Python
Postgres
Terraform
Golang
Datadog
Expert level
Remote from US
501-1000 employees
FintechB2CInsuranceSaaS
Company mission
To protect the next million families.
Role
Who you are
- Experience: 10+ years of full-time software engineering experience in relevant roles (SRE, Infrastructure, Platform, DevOps, or Backend SWE), including significant time operating production systems at scale
- Staff-Level Impact: A track record of leading complex, multi-team infrastructure or reliability initiatives from ambiguity to delivery, and of influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team
- Software Engineering: Strong coding skills in Golang, Python, or TypeScript, and a commitment to engineering best practices: design patterns, code reviews, and testing
- Cloud & Platform Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform. Experience building Kubernetes operators is a plus
- Systems Knowledge: Strong understanding of distributed systems, PostgreSQL, CI/CD systems, and observability tooling such as DataDog
- Reliability Practice: Hands-on experience implementing SLIs/SLOs, leading incident response, and running effective post-mortems
- Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication. You can write a clear design doc, explain trade-offs to executives, and build consensus across teams
- Mindset: A strong desire to remove toil from systems, and the judgment to balance reliability, velocity, and cost
- Don’t meet every single requirement? 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 anyway
Desirable
- Experience building or operating LLM toolchains, such as AI gateways, model routing (e.g., Bedrock, Anthropic), and governance frameworks, including PII scanning and audit trails for model interactions
- Demonstrated experience leading cloud cost optimization or building usage metering systems
- Experience in regulated industries (insurance, fintech, healthcare) or with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2
- Experience collaborating with globally distributed teams
What the job involves
- Ethos is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a technical leader for our SRE organization in the US. In this role, you will help set the technical direction for how Ethos builds, runs, and scales production systems, from our core AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure to the internal platforms and toolchains that power our AI initiatives
- This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with organization-wide scope. You will design and build critical infrastructure yourself, lead cross-team initiatives from conception to delivery, and raise the reliability bar across engineering by partnering closely with product teams, up to and including submitting PRs to their codebases. You will work alongside SRE leadership in the US and Bangalore to shape the roadmap, and you will be a go-to technical authority for reliability, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency
- Technical Leadership & Strategy
- Set Direction: Define and drive the multi-quarter technical strategy for reliability, infrastructure, and platform tooling, in partnership with SRE and engineering leadership and aligned with company OKRs
- Architecture: Lead the design of complex, cross-cutting infrastructure systems. Author and review technical specifications and architecture proposals to ensure consistency, resilience, and long-term maintainability
- Influence Without Authority: Motivate product engineering teams to adopt reliability best practices, and act as a trusted advisor on production readiness when new services are designed and brought online
- Mentorship: Grow the technical skills of SREs across our US and Bangalore teams through design reviews, pairing, and code review, and help raise the hiring bar by participating in interviews
- Reliability & Performance Engineering
- Service Standards: Establish the framework for how teams define, measure, and act on SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets. Help teams instrument and monitor them
- Incident Excellence: Serve as a senior technical leader during high-severity incidents. Drive a culture of rigorous, blameless post-mortems and ensure follow-up work actually reduces recurrence
- Resilience: Lead capacity planning, disaster recovery, and failure-mode testing so our systems degrade gracefully and recover quickly
- Observability: Evolve our monitoring and alerting strategy so failures are detected before they impact customers and on-call is sustainable
- Infrastructure & AI Platform Tooling
- Scalable Systems: Design, build, and operate our AWS cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Kubernetes, and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Atlantis)
- AI Gateway & Governance: Architect and build governed gateways for AI model routing, including model access controls, audit trails, and secure data connectors (such as MCP) that prevent sensitive data exposure
- Security & Compliance: Ensure infrastructure, including AI prototyping environments, meets security and regulatory requirements through automated scanning, PII guardrails, and scoped data access
- Efficiency & Cost Optimization
- FinOps: Lead initiatives to optimize cloud spend across the organization, including right-sizing, spot instance utilization, and cost attribution
- AI Cost Management: Design metering and budgeting for LLM token usage, and build cost-aware routing so workloads use the most efficient model for the job
- Visibility: Establish clear cost metrics and partner with engineering teams on architectures that are both performant and cost-effective
- Developer Productivity
- Paved Roads: Build internal tools, CI/CD pipelines, and self-service platforms that make the reliable path the easy path for product engineering teams
- Toil Elimination: Identify systemic sources of toil across engineering and automate them away
- Our Tech Stack
- Languages: TypeScript, Golang, Python
- Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, Atlantis
- Observability & Tools: DataDog, GitHub Actions, PostgreSQL
- AI Platform: Anthropic, Bedrock, MCP
Our take
Ethos was founded to increase the transparency of life insurance, making it accessible and affordable to all. The company wants to add openness to the process; losing a loved one is hard enough before one even considers financial implications, particularly with the loss of a primary earner.
Ethos uses predictive technology to rapidly quote life insurance rates and verify an applicant’s medical information. This expedited process allows most users to secure life cover on the same day they apply, a process which normally takes a number of weeks. The company works with some of the biggest providers in the industry, including Legal & General America, AAA Life and Ameritas Life Insurance Corp.
Ethos has been one of the more heavily publicized of the recent wave of insurtech companies, with investors such as Google as well as celebrities Will Smith and Jay Z, taking its valuation to over $2B and putting it in a great spot for future growth.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
72% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jul 2021
$100m
SERIES D
May 2021
$200m
SERIES D
Total funding: $406.5m
Company benefits
- Comprehensive benefits packages: Awesome medical dental, vision and as applicable insurance coverage and retirement plans (in the US we offer a 401(k) plan).
- Company Equity: We want you to feel and act like an owner.
- Rest, relax & recharge: We encourage our employees to take time off, in addition to our fully paid global company holiday schedule. When you need time away from work, we have paid and flex time options based on your role and location, and additional paid leave programs.
- Generous leave programs: As well as offering a wide array of leave programs, new parents can take leave with 100% wage replacement. Our healthcare plans offer coverage on family planning and fertility.
Company HQ
Berkley Square - Headway, Austin, TX
Leadership
Peter Colis
(Co-Founder & CEO)After an MBA at Stanford, Peter co-founded Ovid Corp in 2014, where he worked as CEO for 4 years before co-founding Ethos in 2016. He has worked as CEO since, alongside serving as a Sequoia Capital Scout.
Lingke Wang
(Co-Founder)After working as an Investment Banker at Morgan Stanley Lingke gained an MBA from Stanford. He then co-founded Ovid Corp. an insurance company before Ethos.
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