Senior Site Reliability Engineer, IaaS

📋 Job Overview

Algolia is undergoing a significant engineering transformation, moving from a production fleet of approximately 4,000 bare-metal servers to a unified cloud and Kubernetes platform designed to support Algolia’s growth for years to come. This is not a lift-and-shift project but an opportunity to rethink how Algolia provisions, secures, operates, observes, upgrades, and scales production infrastructure.

🏢 About Algolia

Algolia powers search and discovery for businesses worldwide. Our mission is to make search and discovery easy for everyone. We are a high-trust environment that values autonomy, diversity, and collaboration. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone is respected and supported.

🎯 The Role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer in IaaS, you will help shape the next generation of Algolia’s production infrastructure. You will lead major parts of the Cloud Baseline and the reliable lifecycle capabilities that enable teams to operate and migrate workloads safely on a cloud-native platform. You will work across cloud foundations, Kubernetes, platform engineering, automation, reliability, and large-scale production operations.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of Cloud Baseline capabilities across cloud providers, including identity and access, networking, account structure, security, auditability, tagging, inventory, and cost visibility.
• Design and automate cloud infrastructure foundations that enable a growing fleet of production Kubernetes clusters.
• Lead complex infrastructure initiatives, such as cloud-environment standardisation, cluster lifecycle automation, upgrade strategies, or infrastructure-drift reduction.
• Ensure cloud and Kubernetes foundations, lifecycle operations, and operational guardrails are reliable and scalable enough to support large-scale workload migration without compromising customer experience.
• Treat the platform as a product: define clear interfaces, reusable modules, self-service workflows, documentation, and reliable operational standards for the engineers who consume it.
• Build automated guardrails for security, compliance, reliability, and safe change management, allowing teams to move faster without weakening production protections.
• Improve platform efficiency through capacity planning, rightsizing, autoscaling, resource governance, and clear cost visibility.
• Use automation and AI-assisted engineering tools where appropriate to improve fleet-scale analysis, infrastructure documentation, and safe, repeatable operational changes.
• Mentor engineers, share knowledge, and raise the quality of infrastructure design and operations across the team.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, FinOps, and engineering teams to align technical decisions and deliver high-impact platform capabilities.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and lead the resolution of complex production issues.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Strong hands-on production expertise with AWS or GCP.
• Deep practical Kubernetes knowledge, including its cloud infrastructure dependencies and operational challenges.
• The ability to design, build, and operate reliable cloud infrastructure in production.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code and automation skills, ideally Terraform and Python, Go, or equivalent.
• Solid knowledge of Linux, networking, distributed systems, and production operations.
• A platform mindset: you design for the engineers who consume what you build, balancing velocity, correctness, security, and reliability.
• Awareness of cloud cost drivers and the ability to treat cost as an engineering constraint.
• A track record of leading complex technical initiatives and delivering durable solutions across teams.
• Comfort adopting AI-assisted engineering tools, with strong judgement for critical production systems.
• Excellent spoken and written English skills.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Familiarity with more than one public cloud provider.
• Knowledge of GitOps or policy-as-code tooling, such as Argo CD, Helm, OPA, or Kyverno.
• Exposure to cloud migration, platform engineering, FinOps, or large-scale infrastructure transformation.

🎁 Benefits

Algolia’s flexible workplace model is designed to empower all Algolians to fulfill our mission to power search and discovery with ease. We place an emphasis on an individual’s impact, contribution, and output, over their physical location. Algolia is a high-trust environment and many of our team members have the autonomy to choose where they want to work and when. We have a global presence with offices in Paris, NYC, London, Sydney and Bucharest, however we also offer many of our team members the option to work remotely either as fully remote or hybrid-remote employees.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Algolia is committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone is respected and supported—regardless of race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability, or socioeconomic background.