We're seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer who can own our data tier at high availability while also pulling weight across the broader platform. As Zello scales, the line between \"database problem\" and \"platform problem\" keeps blurring. We want someone who can sit on either side of it. This hire owns our data tier reliability (MySQL, MongoDB, ScyllaDB, Elasticsearch, Redis) and contributes to monitoring, on-call, and our ongoing cloud modernization efforts.
The Platform team builds and operates the infrastructure that makes that possible. Databases sit at the center of that promise: every channel, every message, every login depends on them.
Key Responsibilities
Design, deploy, and operate highly available MySQL and MongoDB clusters across our cloud environments; replication, sharding, backups, point-in-time recovery, upgrades, and disaster recovery.
Tune query performance, schema, and index strategy in partnership with application engineers and push fixes upstream into the application when that's the right answer.
Extend our observability stack — Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo — so the data tier is as well instrumented as the application tier, and traces actually reach the root cause.
Participate in the Platform on-call rotation, lead incident response for data-tier issues, and write postmortems that drive durable change.
Improve disaster recovery, security posture, and compliance for our database footprint — encryption, access control, audit logging, backup integrity.
Evaluate and operate ScyllaDB/Cassandra and Elasticsearch where they fit the workload, and bring an opinion on when they don't.
Write the automation, tooling, and operators that take repetitive work off the team's plate.
Use AI to compress incident response and root-cause analysis; building agents, automation, and developer-enablement tooling that scale the team's reliability work
About Zello
Zello is a voice-first communication platform, powered by our industry-leading push-to-talk technology, to improve collaboration and productivity for desk-less workers. With over 175+ million users, we're the #1 rated push-to-talk app in the world, delivering 9 billion (yes, with a B) messages a month.
At Zello, our company values are at the heart of what we do everyday. We're proud to serve the frontline, we're privileged to connect people in times of crisis across the globe, and we're honored to support first responders.
Required Qualifications
You've operated highly available MySQL and MongoDB in production at scale; replication, sharding, backups, point-in-time recovery, and failover drills you've actually run, not just designed on paper.
You diagnose database performance end-to-end; query plan, indexes, locking, OS, storage, network — and can point to specific incidents where you found and fixed root cause that others had missed.
You've shipped meaningful work on at least two of bare metal Linux, containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes, or similar), and a major cloud (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure equivalent is fine).
You instrument what you build. You've used Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or comparable systems to close real incidents, and you've written the dashboard the next on-call engineer will actually open.
You write code that runs in production: Python, Go, Bash, or similar for automation, tooling, or operators. You don't hand off scripting to someone else.
You communicate clearly under pressure and after the fact. Your postmortems are blameless, specific, and lead to changes that stick — and the people you've worked with describe collaborating with you as straightforward.
You bring an opinion on managed vs. self-managed databases
