Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

At InStride people are our purpose.

We believe that investing in people is the most powerful way to drive successfor individuals and organizations alike.

As a public benefit corporation we partner with leading employers to unlock opportunities for their employees providing access to top-tier education programs that align with their employees career goals and the companys business goals.

Our mission goes beyond skill-building; were here to empower our partners employees to advance their careers elevate their expertise and achieve meaningful personal and professional growth.

No matter the team youre on our dedication to the success of our partners and their employees is what drives us. If youre passionate about making a difference and driving educational and professional advancement InStride is the place for you.

To get a better feel for our culture watch more here.

Candidates must be located in one of the following states to be considered eligible for employment: AZ CA CO CT FL GA IL IN KS LA MD MA MI MO NV NH NJ NY PA OH OR TX VA WA WI.

What were looking for:

Were looking for a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join InStrides growing engineering team. This is a highly technical role for an individual contributor who thrives at the intersection of cloud architecture automation and reliability engineering. You will be the go-to AWS expert for complex initiatives setting technical direction and raising the bar for operational excellence across our platform. At InStride every system you design every automation you implement and every safeguard you put in place will directly support our mission of expanding access to life-changing education for working adults around the globe.

Skills wed love to see you show off:

• Cloud Architecture & Strategy: Design and optimize AWS environments that balance scalability resilience and cost efficiency for enterprise workloads.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Serve as a trusted technical advisor guiding engineers on best practices in Kubernetes DevSecOps and AWS-native design patterns.
• Infrastructure as Code Mastery: Build reusable version-controlled IaC libraries with AWS CDK Terraform or CloudFormation to standardize deployments.
• Security & Compliance by Design: Enforce least-privilege IAM encryption-by-default and policy-as-code guardrails to meet security and regulatory standards.
• Observability & Reliability Engineering: Define SLIs/SLOs manage error budgets and implement monitoring strategies with Prometheus Grafana and AWS-native tools.
• CI/CD Excellence: Optimize automated pipelines with Harness and GitHub enabling faster safer and more reliable software delivery.
• Networking & Resilience: Architect secure performant VPCs load balancing and multi-region failover strategies with AWS networking services.
• Automation & Self-Service Enablement: Deliver developer-friendly automation and Internal Developer Portal (IDP) capabilities that empower teams to provision infrastructure without SRE intervention.

Who you are:

• 10 years of experience in SRE DevOps or Platform Engineering roles operating production AWS workloads.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS EKS Kubernetes networking Helm autoscaling frameworks (Karpenter/Cluster Autoscaler) serverless architectures and API Gateways.
• Proven delivery of service mesh solutions (Istio Linkerd or AWS App Mesh) for secure and observable service-to-service communication.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using AWS CDK (TypeScript preferred/Python) Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Strong programming and automation skills in Go Python or TypeScript with additional proficiency in Bash.
• Demonstrated experience implementing policy-as-code with OPA/Rego or similar tooling integrated into CI/CD pipelines.
• Solid understanding of SLI/SLO/error-budget methodologies and hands-on experience with monitoring and alerting stacks (Prometheus Grafana CloudWatch Groundcover).
• Deep knowledge of AWS security best practices including IAM policies encryption OS hardening and compliance enforcement.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate reliability metrics into business impact and guide incident/post-mortem discussions.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing enterprise AWS and DevOps strategies without direct management responsibilities.
• Familiarity with Internal Developer Portals (Backstage Port Cortex) and self-service automation is a strong plus.

How you will create impact:

• Elevate platform reliability: Design and operate multi-region fault-tolerant systems that ensure InStrides learning platform is always available for learners and partners.
• Advance automation at scale: Deliver Infrastructure as Code libraries CI/CD pipelines and self-service capabilities that reduce operational toil and accelerate developer productivity.
• Champion security and compliance: Implement defense-in-depth strategies policy-as-code guardrails and proactive monitoring to protect sensitive data and maintain trust.
• Drive observability maturity: Define and enforce SLIs/SLOs establish error-budget policies and build monitoring frameworks that inform release readiness and operational decisions.
• Enable seamless service connectivity: Deploy and manage service mesh solutions that secure monitor and optimize service-to-service communication across Kubernetes workloads.
• Influence technical direction: Partner with engineering and security stakeholders to shape InStrides AWS strategy ensuring scalability resilience and cost efficiency.
• Mentor and uplift engineers: Share expertise lead design reviews and guide teams toward modern DevOps and SRE practices raising the technical bar across the organization.

We are looking for someone who is not only technically skilled but also enthusiastic about making ameaningful impact. If this description resonates with you were excited about the possibility of having youon our team. As a skills-driven employer we encourage you to apply if there is a skill-fit even in theabsence of years of experience.

Dont meet every single requirement Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At InStride we are dedicated to building a diverse inclusive and authentic workplace so if youre excited about this role but your past experience doesnt align perfectly with every qualification in the job description we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this role!

Benefits @ InStride

As an organization that champions investing in people its critical we walk the talk. Thats why InStride employees are eligible to enroll in 2800 online certificate and degree programs through our Step Forward program. Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs InStride covers your tuition upfront regardless of your course of study degree type or school - eligible to employees starting Day 1.

This role is also eligible for the following benefits:

• 401(k) plan with company match
• Flexible vacation policy
• Paid family leave
• Best-in-class health care benefits
• And more!

InStride Diversity and Inclusion Statement

At InStride we foster a culture of belonging we support authenticity and intersectionality and we embrace and appreciate our differences. We do this by building a diverse pipeline of talent and ensuring equitable access to opportunities information and leadership. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation please let your recruiter know.

Policies & Disclosure

InStride recommends employees have their COVID vaccinations. InStride may require employees to have COVID vaccination before entering the office or attending any InStride-related even in the future. However we do not require this at this time.

For questions on how we use personal information of job applicants please refer to InStrides Job Applicant Privacy Policy.

Beware of recruiting scams. InStride does not require a financial transaction or any financial account information to be eligible for employment. If you receive a message purporting to be from InStride asking you for a financial transaction your financial account information or any other sensitive information please do not respond and let us know immediately at .

About InStride

InStride is a human capital management company that helps organizations retain talent upskill employees and fill critical workforce roles through education programs. By breaking down barriers to learning fostering career growth aligned with organizational goals and simplifying program management InStride delivers lasting impact. Partnering with forward-thinking companies like Labcorp Adidas and SSM Health InStride drives meaningful social and business outcomes by providing access to life-changing education. Visit or follow InStride on LinkedIn for more information and up-to-date news.