Staff Site Reliability Engineer

If you are looking for a career at a dynamic company with a people-first mindset and a deep culture of growth and autonomy, ACV is the right place for you! Competitive compensation packages and learning and development opportunities, ACV has what you need to advance to the next level in your career.  We will continue to raise the bar every day by investing in our people and technology to help our customers succeed. We hire people who share our passion, bring innovative ideas to the table, and enjoy a collaborative atmosphere.
 

Who we are: 

ACV is a technology company that has revolutionized how dealers buy and sell cars online. We are transforming the automotive industry. ACV Auctions Inc. (ACV), has applied innovation and user-designed, data driven applications and solutions. We are building the most trusted and efficient digital marketplace with data solutions for sourcing, selling and managing used vehicles with transparency and comprehensive insights that were once unimaginable. We are disruptors of the industry and we want you to join us on our journey. Our network of brands include ACV Auctions, ACV Transportation, ClearCar, MAX Digital and ACV Capital within its Marketplace Products, as well as, True360 and Data Services.

 At ACV we focus on the Health, Physical, Financial, Social and Emotional Wellness of our Teammates and, to support this, we offer:

• Multiple medical plans including a high deductible, low cost health plan 
• Company-sponsored (paid) Short-Term Disability, Long-Term Disability, and Life Insurance
• Comprehensive optional benefits such as Dental, Vision, Supplemental Life/AD&D, Legal/ID Protection, and Accident and Critical Illness Insurance
• Generous paid time off options, including uncapped vacation days, the greater of 3 paid sick days or in accordance with the applicable state or local paid sick leave law, 6 paid company holidays, 2 floating holidays, parental leave, bereavement leave, jury duty leave, voting leave, and other forms of paid leave as required by applicable law or regulation
• Employee Stock Purchase Program with additional opportunities to earn stock in the Company
• Retirement planning through the Company’s 401(k) 

Who we are looking for:

We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to set the technical direction for reliability across ACV’s engineering organization. You’ll work alongside infrastructure, platform, quality, and product engineering teams to define how we build, deploy, observe, and operate production systems at scale. We value practical software engineering experience and computer science fundamentals, and we care less about which specific tools you’ve used than your ability to solve complex problems and apply engineering best practices.

You’re an engineer other engineers seek out when something is hard: a failing service, an unclear architecture decision, or a reliability problem that crosses team boundaries. You lead through influence rather than authority, and you raise the bar by building paved roads, mentoring others, and making the right way the easy way. You can go from “why did this service fail?” to “here’s the systemic fix, here’s how we automate it for every service, and here’s how we keep it from happening again.”

What you will do:

• Set the reliability strategy and technical standards for ACV’s engineering organization, including SLOs and error budgets, release practices, and production readiness.

• Design, build, and scale infrastructure on AWS and/or GCP and Kubernetes, with an IaC-first approach (Terraform, Helm).

• Build golden paths and self-service tooling that give every service dashboards, monitoring, logging, alerting, and deployment pipelines out of the box.

• Partner with engineering teams to improve architecture for resiliency, scalability, and fault tolerance, including support for multi-region and international growth.

• Drive standardization of observability, monitoring, and alerting practices to improve MTTD and MTTR and to shift problem detection left of production.

• Simplify and harden the deployment process to lower change failure rate and shorten lead time for new products and services.

• Lead incident response as an escalation point for live-site issues, and own Root Cause Analysis and Problem Management (ITIL) for major outages, ensuring corrective actions are completed.

• Audit current systems, identify risks and opportunities to reduce incidents, and automate repetitive operational and administrative work.

• Plan maintenance activity and write design documentation, standard procedures, and runbooks.

• Evaluate and introduce modern technologies, such as OpenTelemetry, where they add clear value, and help retire legacy components.

• Mentor SREs and software engineers, review designs and code, and contribute to a collaborative, continuously improving team culture.

• Participate in an on-call rotation.

• Perform additional duties as assigned.

What you will need:

• BS degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, Platform Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure, or Observability Engineering, including a track record of technical leadership across multiple teams.

• Deep experience building and managing production infrastructure on Amazon Web Services and/or Google Cloud Platform.

• Experience building, maintaining, and scaling Kubernetes clusters for production workloads.

• Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform and deployment tooling such as Helm.

• Experience designing CI/CD pipelines and build tooling (e.g., Jenkins), and driving improvements in deployment safety and speed.

• Hands-on expertise with observability and monitoring platforms (e.g., Datadog), including metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, and SLOs.

• Proven experience defining and operating SLOs and error budgets and using them to drive engineering priorities.

• Highly proficient in version control, including trunk-based development, multiple release planning, cherry-picking, and rebase.

• Strong software engineering skills and a solid grasp of fundamentals, including major data structures (arrays, dictionaries, strings).

• Self-sufficient debugger who can diagnose and resolve complex problems in code and in distributed systems.

• Strong problem-solving skills, with the confidence and resourcefulness to independently explore solutions thoroughly.

• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to influence technical direction and partner with engineering leadership.

Preferred:

• Experience with OpenTelemetry and building internal developer platforms or golden paths.

• Experience developing in Golang

• Experience with high-volume, highly distributed production environments.

• Experience with databases and data platforms.

• Experience with observability cost optimization and usage governance.

• Experience with multi-region or international cloud architectures.