Sr. Site Reliability Engineer (Remote)

About Quizlet:

Inspired by our belief that anyone can learn anything and powered by our own curiosity, we build the smartest tools we can imagine to help students learn.

Quizlet is the popular, global learning platform and app that millions of students, teachers and everyday people use to study any subject imaginable for school, work or as part of their personal interests -- including two-thirds of high school students and half of all college students in the US. Combining cognitive science and machine learning, Quizlet guides students through adaptive study activities to confidently reach their learning goals. We’re on track to become the undisputed leader in user-generated learning content and engagement, at the scale of YouTube.

Valued at $1 billion, Quizlet has raised over $60 million in venture capital from investors including Icon Ventures, Union Square Ventures, General Atlantic, Costanoa Ventures, Owl Ventures, and Altos Ventures.

To serve our global community of learners, our teams tackle lofty technical challenges and design for use cases across cultures and languages. We work hard, act like owners, and collaborate every chance we get. We’re energized by the potential to power more learners through multiple approaches and various tools.

With offices in major cities around the world and ambitious plans for expansion, we remain grounded in our commitment to our mission of helping people learn. We’re looking for new team members who crave a challenge and want to help us continue amplifying our impact. 

About the Team:

As part of Technical Infrastructure, Quizlet’s SRE team gets big things done by doing them ourselves and especially by empowering and enabling other teams to take on ownership. Over the past year we’ve completed a migration of Quizlet’s web app to Kubernetes, and we’re continuing to modernize other parts of the infrastructure using cloud-native technologies, following the gitOps philosophy to doing continuous delivery and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices to automate all things infrastructure. We follow a loose scrum approach with daily standups and biweekly planning and team retros. The projects we work on take more than a single sprint to accomplish, but we still take time to show and tell our achievements on a biweekly cadence.

Quizlet as a whole is on a path to teams owning their own reliability, and the SRE team continues to be a role model and influence in the effort, offering training and advice in how to run on-call, build monitoring and alerting, and understand the performance of our software.

About the Role:

The beauty of the SRE role is it’s really hard to describe an average day. There’s always something new to look at, and new teams to work with. When you’re on-call you’re likely to be proactively chasing down abnormal latency spikes, tackling complex software or system issues or unblocking someone from another team. When you’re not on-call you’ll be working on strategic projects aiming to increase service resilience and overall reliability. You will build, extend or enhance existing tools/frameworks that not only reduce toil but also enable other teams and our own team to perform other projects/tasks faster, securely and reliably.

In this role, you will:

• Enable Quizlet’s growth by solving scaling and infrastructure problems that permit Product Engineering to deliver Quizlet’s features to more users, no matter where in the world they are
• Support the infrastructure you build as part of an on-call rotation
• Attempt to automate yourself out of a job (not actually possible, but we try!)
• Improve our ability to understand the performance of our systems through enhanced observability
• Combine your software development, systems engineering and general systems administration/networking expertise to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant software systems and infrastructure
• Be in the thick of solving sometimes unexpected problems of running systems at scale

What you bring to the table:

• Proficiency with containers, Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Proficiency in Python and/or Go
• Strong familiarity with DataDog, RUM and APM
• Strong familiarity in designing, operating and triaging issues with large scale distributed systems
• Systematic problem-solving approach, coupled with good communication skills and a strong sense of ownership
• Ability to work across team boundaries to identify and solve pain points that affect engineer velocity and system reliability
• You feel energized by solving unique problems 
• Strong familiarity with incident management best practices
• A reliable teammate with a cool head during crisis
• You feel passionate about automation and building products. You will be writing code but at times you work will also involve operationalizing and integrating systems to enable other Engineers deliver their applications to our Cloud environment and to keep the continuous delivery pipeline humming

Bonus points if you have:

• Significant production experience with Kubernetes at very large scale
• Love and understanding of CNCF products
• Proficiency with Google Cloud Platform
• Proficiency with Istio and Chaos testing strategies
• Familiarity with Kotlin and Typescript

Compensation, Benefits & Perks:

• COLORADO CANDIDATES : Base pay for this role starts at $124,000. The actual pay may be higher depending on your skills, qualifications, and experience
• Employees are also eligible to participate in the Quizlet stock option program
• Collaborate with your manager and team to create a schedule that ensures a high level of productivity (creating that ideal work/life balance)
• We offer 20 days of paid vacation (and we expect you to take them!)
• Comprehensive health coverage (Anthem, Kaiser), HSA, FSA, dental and vision (Guardian), competitive salary, 401(k), and equity
• Other perks include: Wellness stipend, pet insurance offerings, annual learning and development stipend, commuter subsidy, and 40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice
• In addition, we offer access to mental health resources, fertility education, fertility preservation, IVF, genetic testing, surrogacy, adoption, and more

We strive to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome! 

We work to create a holistic interview process, where both Quizlet and candidates have an opportunity to view what it would be like to work together, in exploring a mutually beneficial partnership.

We provide a transparent setting, that gives a comprehensive view of who we are!

In Closing:

We hope you are excited about everything you read so far. We highly encourage you to apply for this position, even if you feel you do not meet all the requirements. Quizlet is always looking for amazing folks that believe in our mission and can contribute to our team in various ways - not merely candidates that fit a certain mold.

We have a bias for action, take initiative, and hustle to deliver results. We make informed decisions whenever possible but are unafraid to take calculated risks on great ideas to promote learning. We embrace challenges and see effort as the path to mastery. We’re constantly seeking opportunities to learn and we embrace curiosity. Quality matters at Quizlet, and we hold the bar high on everything we do.

We treat each other with honesty and respect, encourage vigorous debate, and seek critical feedback. We value diversity, humility, transparency, and collaboration as the best paths to our success — as individuals, as a team, and as a company.

Quizlet’s success as an online learning community depends on a strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are actively working to build a team that is representative of the diverse communities we serve, and an open, inclusive work environment where all employees can thrive. As an equal opportunity employer and a tech company committed to societal change, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. Women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, individuals with disabilities, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. Come join us!

To All Recruiters and Placement Agencies:

At this time Quizlet does not accept unsolicited agency resumes and/or profiles. 

Please do not forward unsolicited agency resumes to our website or to any Quizlet employee. Quizlet will not pay fees to any third-party agency or firm nor will it be responsible for any agency fees associated with unsolicited resumes. All unsolicited resumes received will be considered the property of Quizlet.