Site Reliability Engineer (Pacific timezone

PostHog Inc

CA

JOB DETAILS
SKILLS
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Analysis Skills, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automation, Autoscaling, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer/Client Research, Data Recovery, Data Warehousing, Debugging Skills, Establish Priorities, Incident Response, Linux Operating System, Machine Tool, Memory Hardware, Network Access Control (NAC), On Call, Online Courses, Open Source, Operating Systems, Operational Improvement, Problem Solving Skills, Product Shipments, Product Support, Product/Service Launch, Production Systems, Public/Media/Press/Analyst Relations, Reliability Engineering, Revenue Analysis, SQL (Structured Query Language), Slack, Small Company, Team Lead/Manager, VMS Operating System, Virtual Machine (VM)
LOCATION
CA
POSTED
30+ days ago

About PostHog

Were shipping every product that companies need to run their business from their first day, to the day they IPO, and beyond. The operating system for folks who build software.

We started with open-source product analytics, launched out of Y Combinators W20 cohort. Weve since shipped more than a dozen products, including:

  • A built-in data warehouse, so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights.

  • A customer data platform, so they can send their data wherever they need with ease.

  • PostHog AI, an AI-powered analyst that answers product questions, helps users find useful session recordings, and writes custom SQL queries.

Next on the roadmap are CRM, Workflow, revenue analytics, and support products. When we say every product that companies need to run their business, we really mean it!

We are:

  • Product-led. More than 100,000 companies have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.

  • Default alive. Revenue is growing 10% MoM on average, and were very efficient. We raise money to push ambition and grow faster, not to keep the lights on.

  • Well-funded. Weve raised more than $100m from some of the worlds top investors. Were set up for a long, ambitious journey.

Were focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring exceptional teammates, shipping fast, and being as weird as possible

Things we care about

  • Transparency: Everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, our strategy, and how we work, in our public company handbook. Internally, we share revenue, notes and slides from board meetings, and fundraising plans, so everyone has the context they need to make good decisions.

  • Autonomy: We don't tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on whats going to have the biggest impact on our customers, and what they find interesting and motivating to work on. Engineers lead product teams and make product decisions. Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed.

  • Shipping fast: Why not now? We want to build a lot of products; we cant do that shipping at a normal pace. Weve built the company around small teams - autonomous, highly-efficient groups of cracked engineers who can outship much larger companies because they own their products end-to-end.

  • Time for building: Nothing gets shipped in a meeting. Were a natively remote company. We default to async communication - PRs > Issues > Slack. Tuesdays and Thursdays are meeting-free days, and we prioritize heads down building time over perfect coordination. This will be the most productive job youve ever had.

  • Ambition: We want to solve big problems. We strongly believe that aiming for the best possible upside, and sometimes missing, is better than never trying. Were optimistic about whats possible and our ability to get there.

  • Being weird: Weird means redesigning an already world-class website for the 5th time. It means shipping literally every product that relates to customer data. It means building an objectively unnecessary developer toy with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And its fun.

Who were looking for

We're looking for people (in the Pacific timezones) that like deep ownership of production systems, people that are not afraid of working with stateful infrastructure and love working in AWS, VMs, automation, and making messy systems reliable.

In general we seek SRE's who are:

  • Enthusiastic drivers. We need proactive people that can fully own projects and get them done, and know to get help when needed. "Are we there yet?" is the wrong question.

  • Optimistic problem solvers. Things get hard here sometimes, whether its scaling, shipping complex products, handling a stream of support requests, or trying to ship something that touches multiple teams. We need people who wont get disheartened, and will collaborate, iterate, and ship their way out of anything.

  • Grown ups. We're an international bunch of weirdos, but one thing unites us: everyone is kind, considerate, and professional towards each other. This isnt about age or experience, its about being low-ego, flexible, and respectful.

  • Genuine builders. PostHog is full of people who just love building stuff, people who would still be building software even if there wasnt a paycheck at the end. If this sounds like you, we should talk.

What youll be doing

You won't be in a typical "keep the lights on" SRE role. The work is about turning a fast-growing, stateful system into a predictable, well-automated platform. (provisioning, scaling, rebalancing, recovery)

That means reducing operational stress, designing safe automation for traffic-heavy workloads, and building the tooling and patterns that let the system scale without scaling human effort.

Youll work on the kind of problems that only show up at large scale (petabytes of data, thousands of cores, constant ingestion) across a multi-region, multi-account AWS platform running many services on Kubernetes.

  • Operating EKS clusters across several environments with Karpenter autoscaling, Cilium networking, and ArgoCD-driven GitOps deployments

  • Managing and evolving a multi AWS account organization, provisioning, networking, access control, and cross-account connectivity

  • Maintaining the Terraform/Terragrunt IaC platform - modules, automated plan-on-PR / apply-on-merge pipelines, and safe patterns for shared infrastructure

  • Improving operational tooling around deploys, schema changes, backups, restores, and incident response

  • Reducing operational load by identifying repeat pain points and eliminating them through code and self-healing automation

  • Optimizing cloud spend as you go

  • Participating in on-call and incident response, with a strong focus on making incidents rarer over time

Youll have room to design and automate, not just respond to alerts. You should join this team if you like deep ownership of production systems and enjoy building the platform layer that everything else runs on.

Requirements

  • Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production (EKS preferred). Youve debugged node pressure, networking issues, and deployment failures at scale (thousands of nodes)

  • Strong experience operating production infrastructure on AWS. Not just one account, but understanding organizational boundaries, IAM, and networking between many

  • Experience automating infrastructure using Terraform or Terragrunt at scale, including module design and state management

  • Solid understanding of Linux systems (disk, memory, networking, failure modes)

  • Experience supporting stateful systems (databases, queues, storage systems, etc.)

  • Ability to debug and reason about performance and reliability issues in production

  • Youre comfortable owning systems end-to-end, including on-call responsibilities

You dont need to be an expert in every system we run on day one. But you do need to enjoy owning complex infrastructure and learning how the pieces fit together.

Nice to have

  • Experience with GitOps workflows (ArgoCD) and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions)

  • Experience with building AI agent-enabled base-level infra services for teams that move fast

  • Familiarity with multi-region infrastructure and the consistency/availability tradeoffs that come with it

If this sounds like you, we should talk.

We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know.

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About the Company

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PostHog Inc