Accela
Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Remote Based - US · Principal · Full-time
Sponsorship not specified$160k-$185kDetected 34 days ago
Distributed SystemsGitAzureCloud PlatformsLinuxDevOpsSite Reliability EngineeringComplianceHIPAALeadershipCommunicationCollaboration
About the role
- As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will serve as a technical leader responsible for the reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence of Accela's Civic Platform.
- This role combines deep technical expertise with strategic influence.
- Your focus is simple: keep systems resilient, scalable, secure, and continuously improving.
Responsibilities
- Drive platform modernization initiatives, including the continued evolution from VM-based architectures toward containerized and cloud-native services, in partnership with DevOps Engineering, Database Engineering, Security, and Development teams.
- Lead efforts that improve and sustain the availability, performance, scalability, security, and cost efficiency of Accela's SaaS offerings.
- Define, implement, and operate service level objectives (SLOs), service level agreements (SLAs), and error budgets for critical platform services, using data to drive prioritization and risk-based decision making.
- Lead observability initiatives across metrics, distributed tracing, logging, and monitoring platforms to improve system visibility and accelerate issue detection and resolution.
- Drive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) efforts for complex production incidents, facilitate blameless postmortems, and ensure corrective actions are implemented and tracked to completion.
- Design, develop, and maintain automation, tooling, and software solutions that improve reliability, operational efficiency, scalability, and developer productivity.
- Partner with Security and Compliance teams to ensure platform operations meet regulatory and compliance requirements, including SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and PCI-DSS.
- You will drive reliability initiatives, define operational standards, mentor engineers, and lead complex technical efforts that improve the resiliency and efficiency of our platform.
- From planning, to building, to service request management and more, Accela's SaaS offerings level the playing field for small and medium governments and enable smaller agencies to leverage larger city technologies.
- Accela believes in developing and nurturing a workplace community where our differences are celebrated, and everyone feels a sense of psychological safety and belonging.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Software Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, or related disciplines within a SaaS environment, including experience leading complex technical initiatives.
- Deep expertise designing, operating, analyzing, and troubleshooting complex distributed systems across the application, infrastructure, networking, and operating system layers.
- Strong experience with modern observability platforms, including monitoring, logging, metrics, and distributed tracing.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to engineering leadership and executive stakeholders.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code practices and tooling, particularly Terraform.
- Experience with configuration management platforms such as Ansible.
- Strong Linux systems administration experience alongside Microsoft Windows expertise.
- Experience supporting SaaS platforms subject to public-sector compliance frameworks, including SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and PCI-DSS.
- Experience implementing GitOps deployment methodologies using tools such as Argo CD or Flux.
- Experience implementing and operating OpenTelemetry-based observability solutions.
- Cloud FinOps experience, including cost optimization and resource efficiency initiatives within Microsoft Azure environments.
- Experience leveraging AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar technologies to improve engineering productivity, incident response, automation, and operational efficiency.
- Up to 10% travel for team collaboration, strategic planning sessions, industry conferences, and critical business initiatives.
Compensation
- The annual base salary range for this full-time position is $160,000-$185,000 (less applicable taxes).
- The actual annual base salary offered may be adjusted based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, location, education, skills, training, and experience.
- In addition to an annual base salary, this position is eligible for an annual bonus target.
Benefits
- Our open and flexible technology helps agencies address specific needs today, while ensuring they are well prepared for the emerging challenges of the future.
- Accela is committed to putting resources and attention towards evolving our practices, policies, and philosophies to enable diversity to thrive and to support equity in opportunity for everyone.
- Translate operational metrics, reliability trends, and platform health data into actionable insights for engineering leadership and executive stakeholders.
- In addition to an annual base salary, this position is eligible for an annual bonus target.
- This is a discretionary bonus awarded based on company and individual goal achievement.
Company info
- While government agencies struggle to do more with less, our mission has never been more critical.
Equal opportunity
- Accela is an Equal Opportunity Employer/Affirmative Action Employer and will respond to requests for job accommodations.
- All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, national origin, protected veteran status, or based on disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation
Visa & Work Authorization
- ars, Accela has been an industry leader in designing and delivering government software to improve efficiency, increase citizen engagement and enable the development of thriving communities
This listing is sourced directly from Accela's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.