Principal SRE

**About Backblaze

**

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Principal SRE to join our team!

About the Role We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience collaborating in cross functional teams to manage the design, implementation and ongoing management of the Backblaze core infrastructure. You will be approved to demonstrate strong observability skills, process and service improvement and ability to leverage AI and automation to assist to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand..

As a technical leader in Backblaze you will be expected to work across the organisation to achieve our goals. This will include working with our executives and customers. The role will focus long term strategic focus on platform stability.

Key Responsibilities Service Reliability & Operations

Own the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and accountability for outcomes. Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution. Assist and advise on the design of service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk; partner with service owners to define/iterate SLIs/SLOs and establish error budget policies and alerting. Participate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements. Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).

Architect and Design

Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil. Collaborate with engineering on overall storage design, performance expectation against product SLAs. Define the monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant. Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins). Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.

Collaboration

Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations. Work with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products. Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance. Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.

Continuous Improvement

Lead cross functional teams to identify gaps in observability, operations process and define overall prioritization strategy. Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing those improvements. Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.

Qualifications Education & Experience

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Scie...