Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Systems Engineer III)

About the Role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SE III) at Ophelia, you will be our dedicated reliability, availability, and performance hire, playing a key role in making the systems that support our mission of treating opioid use disorder through telehealth stable, observable, and fast. Our stack is TypeScript on Node, React, and Firebase (e.g., Firestore, Authentication, Hosting) running on Cloud Run in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Your work will have a direct impact on patients, clinicians, and our ability to scale.

You will own and drive our system stability and availability initiative, which is already underway: Terraform-driven uptime checks feed our engineering key performance indicators (KPIs), we have an initial service level objective (SLO) plan, and we've recently revamped our on-call rotation and runbook to keep the on-call engineer focused on severity incidents (SEVs). You will take this from a good start to a mature practice: defining and operationalizing SLOs, building out logging, monitoring, and alerting grounded in sound measurement (e.g., percentile-based latency indicators rather than averages), moving incident response into PagerDuty with clear categorization and escalation paths, expanding our infrastructure as code (IaC) footprint, and working down known pain points such as long-latency endpoints and Cloud Run cold starts. You will also partner closely with our head of IT on IAM hardening, secrets management, audit logging, and HIPAA/SOC 2 infrastructure controls. You will be the directly responsible individual (DRI) for our mean time to recovery (MTTR) KPI and for the measurement and reporting of our availability KPIs.

As a senior engineer, you will be a force multiplier for our team of fullstack engineers who are focused on product work. That means leveling up the team's GCP and DevOps skills through documentation, runbooks, pairing, and code review, and bringing reliability recommendations to new features as they are designed, while primarily owning the infrastructure work yourself. This role is entirely reliability-focused for the first six months; after that, you may contribute to product work as needed, though product work will be at most about 25% of your time.

Ophelia's Technology team actively encourages and invests in AI-augmented ways of working: using tools like Claude and Gemini to accelerate infrastructure code, runbooks, log analysis, and incident triage, and staying current as the AI landscape evolves. Consistent with Ophelia's AI Position Statement, we treat AI as a force multiplier for our team, not a replacement for human judgment: it's there to help you move faster from alert to root cause and spend more time on the reliability and architecture decisions that actually require a person. You'll be expected to use AI fluently in your own workflow, to build it into our operational tooling, and to help shape how the larger technology team uses it responsibly and effectively as it evolves.

Together, we will help hard-to-reach individuals treat their opioid dependence. While direct experience in this treatment area is not mandatory, knowledge of the healthcare space, including understanding health outcomes, benchmarks, systems, and regulatory compliance (HIPAA), is highly beneficial.

Responsibilities

• Own reliability, availability, and performance of our GCP platform. Define and operationalize SLOs and service level indicators (SLIs) with the team, and drive the work that moves them (e.g., endpoint latency, Cloud Run cold starts, time to recovery), and own our disaster recovery posture (e.g., Firestore backup and restore testing, recovery point and recovery time objectives, and multi-region resilience).
• Build observability and incident response. Extend our GCP Cloud Operations setup (log-based metrics, alerting policies, dashboards), move alerting from Slack into PagerDuty, participate in our on-call rotation alongside the rest of the team, and mature that process with clear incident categorization, escalation paths, and an AI-assisted level-one triage tool.
• Grow our infrastructure as code and delivery pipeline. Expand our Terraform footprint beyond observability metrics and ephemeral pull request (PR) environments to the rest of our GCP configuration, and improve our GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline so that deploying four times a day gets safer and faster, not riskier.
• Harden security and compliance controls in partnership with our head of IT, who is the DRI for IT security and our HIPAA/SOC 2 infrastructure controls.
• Multiply the team. Level up our engineers' GCP and DevOps skills through presentations, docs, runbooks, pairing, and code review; bring reliability recommendations to new features early; share reusable AI skills and automation across the team; and set the bar for operational excellence by embodying Ophelia's core values.
• Take ownership of your work in our remote, growth-stage environment, driving projects from inception to impact with autonomy and proactive communication, adapting as our priorities evolve, and staying current with industry practice (including AI tooling) in reliability and cloud infrastructure.

Skills & Competencies

• 5+ years experience in engineering, including 3+ in a cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE-focused role, ideally with a portion at a growth-stage company with bespoke systems.
• Expert-level, hands-on GCP fluency, including serverless compute (e.g., Cloud Run), Cloud Operations (Logging, Monitoring, alerting), IAM, and Firebase/Firestore. Terraform fluency is strongly preferred.
• Expert in at least one language used for infrastructure automation (e.g., Python) and strong in shell scripting. You should be comfortable reading and debugging TypeScript/Node, as that's our entire application codebase; SQL for BigQuery and Log Analytics is a plus.
• Production operations experience, including participating in on-call, leading incident response, writing postmortems, and defining SLOs in keeping with Google SRE practice, and the judgment to adapt those practices to a small team's capacity rather than importing large-company process wholesale.
• Quantitative fluency applied to production systems, e.g., percentiles and tail latency rather than averages, SLO and error-budget math, burn-rate alerting, and reading time series and histograms well enough to tell signal from noise.
• Senior-level ownership and communication, with the ability to own complex, ambiguous projects end-to-end with technical and non-technical stakeholders, clear and proactive communication, and a habit of writing things down (runbooks, postmortems, design docs) and pairing so that knowledge doesn't live only with you.
• Daily, hands-on use of AI tools in your own engineering work (e.g., Claude Code for Terraform, runbooks, and log analysis), and experience building automation with them rather than only using them.

Preferred

• Passionate about our mission to make evidence-based addiction treatment universally accessible.
• Background in a regulated industry, ideally healthcare - telehealth is a big plus - with hands-on experience implementing HIPAA or SOC 2 infrastructure controls.

Our Benefits Include

• Competitive medical, vision, and health insurance (many plans are fully covered for the employee!)
• Start with 20 days (4 weeks) of PTO, increasing to 5 weeks after 2 years and 6 weeks after 5 years of tenure
• 10 company holidays
• Work From Home Stipend
• 401k Contribution Platform
• Additional benefits offered through our benefits provider such as life insurance, short and long term disability, financial wellness, virtual primary care, among others!

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