Staff Site Reliability Engineer

📋 Job Overview

AI is changing how software gets built. Code production is becoming a commodity. The focus is shifting from writing code to specifying, orchestrating, verifying, and governing change – and the toolchain is the new constraint.

We are at the center of this shift. We build Develocity, a toolchain observability and intelligence platform used by some of the world's leading software organizations – Netflix, Airbnb, Spotify, SAP, major global banks, and hundreds more. Develocity helps software teams achieve delivery excellence through deep observability, build and test acceleration, and AI-powered intelligence across the entire toolchain – with support for Gradle Build Tool, Apache Maven™, sbt, npm, Python, and Bazel.

We are an AI-native company. AI is not a feature we're bolting on – it's central to how we work, how we think about our product, and where we're heading. Develocity encodes a decade of build and test expertise into a context engineering layer: the ground truth AI agents need to change code safely, and the governance to attribute and gate that change at machine speed. Trust, evidence, and explainability are at the core of everything we build.

We have partnered with the Apache Software Foundation, the Commonhaus Foundation, the Micronaut Foundation, and other OSS projects such as Spring, Quarkus, Kotlin, JUnit, AndroidX, and many more to bring the values of Develocity also to the OSS Community.

🏢 About Gradle

Gradle is a leading software automation platform that helps developers build, test, and deploy software faster and more reliably. We are building a new SRE team and looking for founding members to help shape how we operate.

🎯 The Role

We're building a new SRE team and looking for founding members to help shape how we operate. As a Lead SRE, you’ll be a technical and operational leader for reliability across Develocity. You’ll help define our SRE vision, set standards for how we operate production services, and mentor other SREs as the team grows. This is a hands-on role with broad influence across engineering, cloud platform, and customer-facing teams.

The SRE team will be responsible for the reliability, performance, and availability of Develocity instances serving paying customers, open-source projects, and public-facing services, plus supporting infrastructure like artifact registries.

You'll work on our internally-built Cloud Application Platform, Kubernetes on AWS, and develop deep expertise in it. When incidents happen, you'll troubleshoot issues across the stack, from application to infrastructure. You'll collaborate with the Cloud Platform team to improve the tooling you depend on, and with engineering teams to build reliability into how we ship software. If you like automating things and hate doing the same task twice, you'll fit in well.

You'll be part of a distributed, remote-first team that values asynchronous communication and written documentation. Strong self-direction and clear communication across time zones are essential.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Operate and maintain all Develocity instances and supporting services in production.
• Define and evolve SRE standards, practices, and operating models, including on-call, incident response, postmortems, and SLOs.
• Participate in an on-call rotation, acting as a technical escalation point for complex or high-severity incidents.
• Lead incident response and blameless retrospectives, ensuring learnings result in measurable reliability improvements.
• Set reliability priorities using risk, customer impact, business goals, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Identify systemic reliability risks and continuously evolve Develocity’s SaaS operations as the platform and customer base grow.
• Lead and influence architectural and design reviews to ensure reliability, scalability, and operability.
• Drive automation across deployment, upgrades, monitoring, self-healing, recovery, and operational workflows.
• Build and maintain comprehensive observability for all managed services, including logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Own disaster recovery, backups, and business continuity planning and execution.
• Partner with engineering leadership to balance feature delivery with reliability and operational excellence.
• Mentor and coach SREs, supporting technical growth and strong operational practices.
• Help onboard new SREs and contribute to hiring by defining and assessing SRE excellence at Gradle.
• Communicate clearly with customers during incidents and maintenance windows.
• Optimize performance, resource utilization, and operational costs.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 7+ years in SRE, DevOps, or an equivalent role operating production services at scale.
• Experience leading reliability initiatives across multiple teams or services.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction without direct authority.
• Experience designing and operating systems with SLOs and error budgets, and exercising strong judgment in balancing reliability, velocity, and cost.
• Strong Kubernetes experience in production environments.
• Cloud infrastructure expertise, preferably AWS (EKS, RDS, S3, EC2).
• Proficiency with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Track record of incident management and response in a 24/7 on-call environment.
• Scripting proficiency (Python, Bash) for automation.
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience as a founding or early SRE establishing practices in a growing SaaS organization.
• Familiarity with Develocity.
• JVM language experience (Java, Kotlin).
• Experience with customer-facing and executive-level incident communications.

🎁 Benefits

• A ground-floor role in a new SRE team - you'll shape how we do things, not inherit someone else's decisions.
• Real ownership of production systems used by engineers at companies you've heard of.
• Direct interaction with customers when things go wrong (and when they go right).
• A culture that values automation over heroics.
• In-person meetings, such as our annual company offsite and team meetings.
• Work from home in a remote-first environment.
• Competitive salaries and equity grants.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Must be located in GMT timezone (UK, Ireland, Portugal, Canary Islands).