Staff Engineer, Site Reliability

LearnUpon
Full-time•DevOps•Dublin, Ireland
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At a glance

Employment type
Full-time
Workplace
On-site
Category
DevOps

Technologies & skills

What you'll be doing

Staff Site Reliability Engineer at LearnUpon in Dublin. Lead infrastructure resilience, observability, and scaling initiatives. Architect SLO/SLI frameworks, mentor engineers, and drive tooling for self-service and operational agility. Requires deep cloud, distributed systems, and automation experience.

  • Identify opportunities to improve and scale infrastructure for performance, observability, maintainability, and cost
  • Lead efforts to build an observability function for metrics, transaction tracking, and event log management
  • Drive processes to maintain resilient, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure
  • Build tools for measuring, monitoring, and alerting with a focus on self-service
  • React quickly to changing customer and business needs and participate in on-call rota
  • Mentor junior talent and communicate complex technical ideas to technical and non-technical peers

Key requirements

Must-have

  • 7+ years in a software or Ops role
  • 5+ years of cloud engineering experience
  • At least 2 years of experience with AWS
  • Experience deploying microservice environments using Kubernetes and Docker
  • Experience designing and implementing observability tech stacks
  • Ability to architect SLO/SLI implementations
  • Experience building and supporting large-scale distributed systems
  • Experience with IaC (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation), automation tooling (e.g., Ansible, Puppet), and CI/CD (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab)

Nice-to-have

  • Experience with database scaling
  • Certification in AWS, any PaaS, or related technologies

Experience: Senior (7+ years in software or Ops, 5+ years cloud engineering, 2+ years AWS)

Role signals

Technical focus
Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure, Observability, Distributed Systems
Leadership
Mentoring
Architecture / system design
Indicated in the listing
Hands-on vs management
Hands-on

Full job description

  • ** Work Mode:** Flex 1+ days per week in our Dublin office

  • ** Department:** Engineering

About the Company

LearnUpon partners with over 1,600 organisations globally to unlock the potential of employees, customers & members through learning that’s easy, scalable and focused on results.

Read more about life at LearnUpon here.

About the Team

Our Engineering organization is dedicated to building robust, scalable infrastructure that handles world-scale platform demands. As part of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, we focus on system architecture, absolute performance, and technical innovation. Operating with high ownership and technical expertise, we are responsible for the scale-out of the LearnUpon infrastructure, championing internal self-service tooling, and embedding a culture of observability and shared operational responsibility across all engineering squads.

About the Opportunity

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you will be a principal technical leader and a key catalyst for our infrastructure's evolution. In this role, you will take ownership of our core platform resilience, driving the strategy to build out an advanced, cost-effective observability function spanning metrics, logs, and transaction tracking. This opportunity requires a strategic thinker who can design cross-team SLO/SLI frameworks, navigate complex distributed system requirements, and mentor talent to ensure LearnUpon scales efficiently to support our ambitious global goals.

In addition, you’ll be responsible for:

  • Infrastructure Optimization: Identify opportunities to improve and scale our infrastructure for performance, observability, maintainability, and cost, by creating innovative solutions.

  • Observability Function Strategy: Lead our efforts to build an observability function that incorporates application metrics, application transaction tracking, and event log management.

  • Resilience & Scaling: Drive the processes to maintain resilient, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure while working with other Engineering teams to provide solutions that meet their ongoing requirements.

  • Tooling & Self-Service: Build tools focused on measuring, monitoring, and alerting, with an eye towards self-service in order to promote Engineers’ ownership of observability.

  • Operational Agility & Support: React quickly to changing customer and business needs and actively participate in the team's on-call rota. Team Up-Leveling: Mentor junior talent and effectively communicate complex technical ideas to both technical and non-technical peers.

Skills & Experience

** Must-Haves **

  • 7+ years of experience in a software or Ops role.

  • 5+ years of cloud engineering experience, with at least 2 years of experience with AWS.

  • Experience deploying Microservice environments using containerisation technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker.

  • Experience designing and implementing Observability tech stacks, championing its benefits to Engineering teams, and managing the associated cost analysis of metrics gathering, effort, and tooling.

  • Ability to architect the design of SLO/SLI implementations that balance the needs of different teams.

  • Experience building and supporting large-scale distributed systems that back a consumer app or website with associated requirements of performance, security, and disaster recovery.

  • Experience with implementing IaC (e.g., CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.), automation tooling (e.g., Puppet, Ansible etc.), and CI/CD (e.g., Jenkins, Travis CI, GitLab, etc.).

  • Experience using AI tools to streamline tasks and improve efficiencies.

** Nice-to-Haves **

  • Experience with database scaling would be a strong plus.

  • Certification in AWS, any PaaS, and/or related technologies.

** If you don’t tick every box but believe this role is a mutually good fit, please don’t hesitate to apply. We’d love to hear from you.*

Why choose LearnUpon?

From comprehensive rewards and generous time off to meaningful investment in your growth and development, LearnUpon gives you the support, trust, and opportunity to do the most impactful work of your career.

Learn more here.

Hiring Process

  • Qualified applicants may be invited to an initial screening call with a member of our TA Team.

  • Successful candidates will be invited to a series of practical interviews.

  • Finally, candidates will have an interview with our CTO.

  • Successful candidates will be contacted with an offer to join our team.

*Note: At LearnUpon, we utilise AI to enhance the speed and quality of our screening and assessment practices, but our hiring decisions are always human. *

If you need any accommodations during the hiring process, please reach out to us at peopleops@learnupon.com.

** LearnUpon is an Equal Opportunities Employer.**

We do not discriminate on the basis of gender, marital status, family status, age disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, membership of the Traveller community, or any other legally protected status.

Check out our Careers site and Instagram to learn more about working at LearnUpon.

By submitting your application, you agree to LearnUpon's Privacy Policy.

Interview prep pack

Grounded in this listing. Use it to prepare examples before you apply.

Your interview focus

You will be assessed on your ability to lead SRE strategy, architect resilient and scalable AWS-based infrastructure, design observability frameworks, and mentor engineering teams. Proven experience with distributed systems, IaC, automation, and containerisation is essential.

  • Observability strategy·High
  • AWS & cloud infrastructure·High
  • Distributed systems resilience·High
  • Mentoring & cross-team leadership·High

Only have 30 minutes?

Follow a focused preparation plan based on this job.

Start 30-minute prep

Your 30-minute plan

  1. Review Observability and SLO/SLI Projects

    0–10 min

    List your most impactful observability and SLO/SLI implementations, focusing on metrics, logs, and cost analysis.

  2. Summarise AWS and Distributed Systems Experience

    10–17 min

    Prepare concise stories about scaling, resilience, and disaster recovery in AWS environments.

  3. Recall IaC, Automation, and Containerisation Examples

    17–24 min

    Note specific tools and outcomes from your work with Terraform, CloudFormation, Puppet, Ansible, Kubernetes, and Docker.

  4. Prepare Mentoring and Communication Stories

    24–30 min

    Identify examples where you mentored engineers or explained complex topics to non-technical peers.

Likely questions

, 8 items

Priority reflects how strongly this topic is emphasised in the job listing, not whether it will be asked.

Talking points

, 6 items
  • Observability Frameworks (Metrics, Logs, Tracing)

    You will lead the design and implementation of observability stacks, so you must demonstrate deep knowledge of monitoring, alerting, and cost-effective tooling.

  • AWS Cloud Engineering

    The role requires at least 2 years of AWS experience and 5+ years in cloud, making AWS proficiency critical for infrastructure design and scaling.

  • Distributed Systems Design & Resilience

    You will architect and support large-scale distributed systems, ensuring performance, security, and disaster recovery.

  • Infrastructure as Code & Automation

    IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation) and automation tools (Puppet, Ansible) are core to the role, enabling scalable, maintainable infrastructure.

  • Containerisation & Microservices (Kubernetes, Docker)

    Experience deploying microservices with containerisation is required for platform scalability and reliability.

  • SLO/SLI Design and Implementation

    You will architect SLO/SLI frameworks to balance team needs and drive reliability across the platform.

What to research

, 2 items
  • Observability Strategy and Implementation

    You will lead the design and rollout of observability stacks, including metrics, logs, and tracing, with a focus on cost and adoption across teams.

  • SLO/SLI Framework Design

    Architecting SLO/SLI frameworks that balance the needs of multiple teams is a core responsibility and likely a key interview focus.

Questions to ask

, 6 items
  1. How does the SRE team collaborate with other engineering squads at LearnUpon?

    Why ask this? To understand cross-team dynamics and your influence as a staff engineer.

  2. What observability tools and platforms are currently in use, and are there plans to evolve them?

    Why ask this? To gauge the maturity of the observability stack and where you can add value.

  3. What are the biggest infrastructure scaling challenges LearnUpon faces today?

    Why ask this? To clarify the immediate priorities and expectations for your impact.

  4. How is success measured for the SRE team and for this role specifically?

    Why ask this? To learn how your contributions will be evaluated.

  5. What opportunities exist for mentoring and upskilling within the engineering organisation?

    Why ask this? To assess how you can contribute to and benefit from team development.

  6. How does LearnUpon approach balancing innovation with operational stability?

    Why ask this? To understand the company's risk appetite and support for new ideas.

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Apply NowApply before: 5 Nov 2026