Senior Site Reliability Engineer

What We’re Building

Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!

If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these blog posts and Honeycomb.io press releases .

Who we are

We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of bees. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.

How We Work

We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1. #LI-Remote

Little more about the team

Honeycomb’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team works at the intersection of infrastructure, developer experience, and organizational enablement. We lead technically complex, cross-team projects that improve reliability, scale systems, and make life easier for engineering teams. We’re trusted across the company to set direction, solve ambiguous problems, and build processes that run smoothly. Our work spans AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Kafka, and other tools, aligned with the sociotechnical needs of scaling a fast-growing company. We’re a collaborative, diverse team that values experimentation, data-driven decisions, and maintaining a safe environment for healthy debate and innovation.

What you’ll do in the role

• Help Honeycomb scale our backend systems to support our highest-volume customers.
• Build organizational trust through transparent communication, giving and receiving direct and kind feedback.
• Work with other backend teams to dive deep into our stack to make sure we’re getting the most out of our infrastructure.
• Be trained, become, and then train others as an Incident Commander.
• Help SRE and Honeycomb develop a healthy cross-Atlantic engineering culture.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation as the EU side of a new follow-the-sun rotation.
• Help the organization navigate tradeoffs between reliability and its other goals and priorities.
• Optional: act as an external ambassador through blog posts, conference talks, and presentations with support from our DevRel team.

What You’ll Bring

• Strong experience in AWS and Kubernetes.
• Experience performing cost analysis and reduction.
• Solid Helm, Terraform, and CI/CD experience.
• Project management skills.
• Software engineering experience (Golang is a plus, and so is performance engineering).
• Experience with Kafka or another high-volume distributed system.
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills, with the ability to tailor your communication for your audience and give direct feedback when you notice something wrong.
• A curiosity to learn how people and systems work, and the willingness to make them partners in your initiatives.
• Familiarity with observability concepts (SLOs, instrumentation) and data-driven decision making.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, with a bias for action and experimentation.
• Interest in both the technical and human sides of reliability engineering.
• Experience working in geographically distributed teams.

Base Salary based on level of experience

£127,670 — £150,200 GBP

What you'll get when you join the Hive

• A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
• It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
• Time to recharge with unlimited PTO
• A distributed-first mindset and culture (really!)
• Home office, co-working, and internet stipend
• Full benefits coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
• Annual development allowance
• And much more...

Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.

Phishing and Recruitment Scam Warning

We take your security seriously. Please be aware that recruitment scams are increasingly common and scammers may create email addresses or websites to impersonate Honeycomb employees. To help protect you:

• All communications will come from an @honeycomb.io email address
• We occasionally work with external recruiting agencies. These partners will use legitimate business email addresses— never personal accounts like Gmail or Yahoo .
• Our recruiting process will never ask you to provide financial or sensitive personal information, including but not limited to:
• Social security or tax identification numbers
• Credit card numbers
• Bank account information

Diversity & Accommodations

We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace—where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We recognize that there is no single path to success and embrace nontraditional career journeys and diverse perspectives as key to building stronger, more innovative teams.

We strive to ensure an inclusive experience throughout every stage of our hiring process and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations as needed. If you require accommodations or accessible formats at any point during our hiring process, please let your recruiter know.

As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work. If there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, we’re always open to feedback.

Privacy Notice

If you apply for a job at Honeycomb and your application is unsuccessful (or you withdraw from the process or decline our offer), Honeycomb will retain your information after your application for a period of time in accordance with local laws. We retain this information for various reasons, including in case we face a legal challenge in respect of a recruitment decision, to consider you for other current or future jobs at Honeycomb, and to help us better understand, analyze and improve our recruitment processes.

For more information regarding our privacy practices please see the Honeycomb Privacy Notice .

If you do not want us to retain your information, or want us to update it, please contact privacy@honeycomb.io . Please note, however, that we may retain some information if required by law or as necessary to protect ourselves from legal claims.