Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Tidelift
Software Engineering
Austin, TX, USA
Posted on Oct 21, 2025
Who is Sonar?
Sonar helps prevent code quality and code security issues from reaching production, amplifies developers' productivity in concert with AI assistants, and improves the developer experience with streamlined workflows. Sonar analyzes all code, regardless of who writes it — your internal team, genAI, or third parties — resulting in more secure, reliable, and maintainable applications. Rooted in the open source community, Sonar’s solutions support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Today, Sonar is used by +7M developers and 400K organizations worldwide, including the DoD, Microsoft, NASA, MasterCard, Siemens, and T-Mobile.
We believe in developing great products that are supported by great internal teams and a strong culture. We are highly committed to and obsessed with the company, users, each other, and our open source community. We have high standards and hold each other accountable for acting with positivity, dedication, thoughtfulness, empathy, and passion daily.
We are deliberate with our decisions with high clarity of intention. At the same time, we feel extreme urgency and move forward quickly.
And lastly, we are highly effective and operationally efficient. We operate collectively as One Team to accomplish our goals.
At Sonar, CODE is more than just an acronym – it's a mindset that defines daily operations.
Why You Should Apply:
At Sonar, we’re a group of brilliant, motivated, and driven professionals working hard to help supercharge developers to build better, faster. Sonar helps to continuously improve code quality and code security while reducing developer toil. This means that developers can focus on doing more of what they love and less of what they don’t. Our solutions don’t just solve symptoms of problems – we help fix issues at the source – for all code, whether it's developer-written, AI-generated, or from third parties.
We have a dynamic culture with employees worldwide and hub offices in the USA, Switzerland, the UK, Singapore, and Germany. Team members should be able to come to work every day, work on a product they are proud of, love what they do, and feel energized by their peers. With our roots deep in the open source community, we’re all about the mission: supercharge developers to build better, faster.
The Impact You Will Have:
We are still at the beginning of our growth journey, so we are putting new processes, technologies, and tools in place on a continuous basis. Your role is a pivotal engineering contributor to the tooling and services to automate and enhance the software development lifecycle, empowering our fellow SonarSourcers to deliver with speed, confidence, and security. You would be a member of a team that delivers solutions across all of our 5 offices: Austin (Texas, US), Geneva (Switzerland), Bochum (Germany) and Singapore.
As a Site Reliability Engineer, you use and create automation tools to monitor and observe production infrastructure services both on premises and in the cloud. You are allergic to repetitive tasks, preferring to maximize automation and reliability. You are expert in change management, infrastructure management, system support, and configuration management.
What You Will Do Daily:
- System Health Monitoring, Alert Triaging, and Error Budget Management: Dedicate time to monitoring critical security infrastructure (e.g., identity platforms, firewalls, compliance systems) and core infrastructure components. Focus on using and maintaining dashboards tied to Service Level Objectives (SLOs), triaging high-severity alerts, and analyzing the current Error Budget burn rate to guide prioritization for the rest of the day.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Policy as Code Development: Spend the largest portion of time writing, reviewing, and testing code (e.g., Python, Go, Terraform, or proprietary tools) to automate the deployment, configuration, and security hardening of infrastructure. This involves treating infrastructure and security policies as software to ensure consistency and prevent configuration drift.
- Toil Elimination and Automation of Operational Tasks: Identify, scope, and implement automated solutions for manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks (toil) related to security patching, compliance checks, certificate rotations, or infrastructure maintenance. The goal is to continuously reduce the operational workload for the team.
- Security Pipeline and Observability Maintenance: Maintain and enhance the DevSecOps security tools integrated into the CI/CD pipelines (e.g., static analysis, vulnerability scanning, security configuration checks). Ensure the end-to-end logging, metrics, and tracing (observability) systems for both infrastructure and security tools are robust, accurate, and provide immediate diagnostic capability during incidents.
- Incident Response Engineering and Post-Mortem Action: Participate in the on-call rotation and actively engage in engineering solutions derived from post-mortems. This means turning incident root causes into preventative measures implemented via code, improving runbooks into automated actions, and reducing Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) for future incidents.
The Experience You Will Need:
- Deep IaC Expertise: Professional experience provisioning and managing complex infrastructure using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation (AWS), or similar tools like Ansible or Puppet for configuration management.
- Cloud/Platform Experience: Hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) or managing large-scale internal/private cloud infrastructure.
- SLO/SLI Implementation: Practical experience defining, measuring, and reporting on Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for critical services.
- Logging/Metrics/Tracing Stacks: Proven experience with modern observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, proprietary systems, or vendor solutions like Datadog/Splunk) for proactive issue identification.
- Networking: Strong understanding of core networking concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, Load Balancing, Firewalls, Proxies) sufficient to debug complex service connectivity and latency issues.
- Automation of Security Controls: Experience implementing security best practices via code, such as automated vulnerability scanning, configuration hardening, secret management (e.g., HashiCorp Vault), and key rotation.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM): Practical experience managing large-scale IAM systems (e.g., implementing least-privilege policies, single sign-on).
- Incident Management: Experience running or significantly contributing to post-incident reviews (post-mortems) and prioritizing resulting engineering work (error budget management).
Why You Will Love It Here:
- Our culture and mission set us apart. We have a dynamic work culture that values respect and kindness and embraces the right to fail (and get right back up again!).
- Great people make a great company. We value people skills as much as technical skills and strive to keep things friendly while still being passionate leaders in our domains.
- We have a flexible work policy that includes 3 days in-office and 2 days work-from-home each week for those located near our office locations; some locations such as Dubai, India, Japan and Australia operate fully remotely.
- We have a growth mindset. We love learning and believe continuous education is critical to our success. In an ever-changing industry, new skills are necessary, and we're happy to help our team acquire them.
- As the leader in our field, our products and services are as strong as our internal team members.
- We embrace transparency with regular meetings, cascading messages and updates on the growth and success of our organization.
Benefits of Working with Sonar:
- Flexible comprehensive employee benefit package.
- We encourage usage of our robust time-off allocations. You will receive 23 days of PTO per calendar year (on a pro-rated basis depending on your employment start date), with additional time provided for sickness, life events and holidays.
- We offer an exciting 401(k) plan that has a 4% match, fully vested on day one of participation.
- Generous discretionary Company Growth Bonus, paid annually.
- Fully paid parking in the heart of downtown Austin, Texas.
- Global workforce with employees in 20+ countries representing 35+ unique nationalities.
- We have an annual kick-off somewhere in the world where we meet to build relationships and goals for the company.
- Monthly catered events, and team events
We Value Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
At Sonar, we believe that our diversity is our strength. We are a global company that values and respects different backgrounds, perspectives, and cultures.
We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
All offers of employment at Sonar are contingent upon the precise results of a comprehensive background check and reference verification conducted before the start date.
We do not currently support visa candidates in the US.
Applications that are submitted through agencies or third party recruiters will not be considered.