Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Company Overview:

At Beam (formerly Edquity), we’re building technology for the social safety net that empowers governments, nonprofits, and institutions to deliver cash assistance and public benefit programs equitably, efficiently, and securely to those who need it most. Our research-backed approach streamlines the administration of benefits while also addressing common pitfalls in program management — including racial bias, inefficiency, compliance risk, and lack of transparency and monitoring — to quickly deliver funds to those with the greatest need. Since 2020, we’ve helped organizations deliver more than $350 million in cash assistance to 300,000+ people across the U.S. Learn more about our impact at https://bybeam.co.

Beam is a Series A stage, venture-backed company and has received support from many of the leading impact and postsecondary success investors and has also received non-dilutive support from foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Job Overview

The Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) plays a crucial role in maintaining Beam's cloud infrastructure and tooling, implementing our DevOps strategy, and managing the monitoring and observability stack that enables our platform to scale reliably. As a cross-functional agile team member, this role will provide cloud architecture expertise, leadership, and advocacy for modern SRE practices and shift left security. The Senior SRE will have a significant impact on Beam’s mission by helping Product and Engineering move fast, identifying risks and inefficiencies and reducing the impact of failures.

This role requires experience with modern software development best practices and building solutions with cloud-based (GCP) technologies for web applications. Our technology stack is built with React and NodeJS (Typescript), running on GraphQL APIs and PostgreSQL. We containerize and deploy with Cloud Run on GCP, manage our infrastructure with Terraform, and use Grafana for monitoring, alerting, incident management, and on-call.

The ideal candidate for this role will have hands-on experience solving operational problems with a software developer’s mindset, removing friction through automation, and promoting observability and metrics as the foundation for efficiently scaling applications. Additionally, an ideal candidate will be excited about advocating for modern DevSecOps practices and building secure and compliant systems.

What You’ll Do

• Own Telemetry and Monitoring | As the Senior SRE, you’ll own our telemetry stack (Grafana and OTEL mostly) and promote observability through all levels of our platform, participate in incident reviews, identify SLOs to improve engineering outcomes, and work with developers to solve problems with metrics.
• Prioritize Security | Lead security reviews of code and systems and assist with hardening our platform against security and compliance risks. Help build a shift left, security-first mindset in our development processes.
• Manage our Google-based Infrastructure | You’ll help manage our GCP infrastructure and work closely with Beam engineers and our Google colleagues to implement cost-effective cloud-based solutions.
• Embrace Automation and Reduce Friction | Identify points of toil, failure, and degraded performance. Design, test, and implement solutions to increase operational and engineering efficiency, whether in application code, infrastructure, or CI/CD processes.
• Promote a collaborative DevOps culture | Manage our DevOps processes and tooling that empower software developers to deploy and own their code all the way to production with minimal friction, collaborate as a cross-functional agile software development team member, participate in code reviews, and practice blameless failure analysis.
• Show the way | Evangelize and keep up with modern cloud services and facilitate the improvement of product stability, performance and security by implementing and training others on SRE best practices.

Qualifications, Experience, and Mindsets:

• Cloud Experience | Minimum four (4) years of GCP experience, including experience with IAM, Cloud Run or GKE, AlloyDB or Cloud SQL, Monitoring and Logging, and VPCs/networking. Experience implementing IaC using Terraform or similar technologies.
• Monitoring | Knowledge of the Grafana ecosystem or similar, building dashboards, alert rules, PromQL, incident management, SLOs, as well as frontend observability.
• Software Background | Past experience building and deploying full-stack web applications to cloud environments. Strong background in object-oriented design fundamentals and experience with RESTful web services and microservices-based architectures. Fluency in at least one programming language (Typescript/JavaScript/Node.js, GoLang, or Python preferred).
• Security | Experience scanning applications and reviewing code for vulnerabilities, identifying security threats in infrastructure and systems, and remediating issues based on priority and SLAs.
• Continuous Integration and Delivery | Able to design and build CI/CD pipelines using any tool (currently using GitHub). Knowledge of various deployment methodologies such as Blue/Green deployments. Familiarity with decoupling deployments from release using traffic splitting, feature toggles, and dark launches.
• Containerization | Experience building docker images and running and troubleshooting docker containers. An understanding of k8s infrastructure.
• Networking | Fluent in networking fundamentals, such as DNS, DHCP, TCP, UDP, NAT, VPN, HTTPS, SSL/TLS, Load Balancers, Reverse Proxies, and an understanding of the OSI model.
• Commitment | A commitment to and passion for Beam’s mission, vision, and values.

Compensation and Benefits:

The salary range for this position has been benchmarked in relation to the scope of the role, market rate, company stage, and internal equity. The base salary for this role will be between $135k - $160k. Where a candidate falls within the band is determined by skillset, experience level, and geographic location. Furthermore, this role will come with a total compensation package that includes equity shares and competitive benefits. Some of our benefits include:

• Fully Paid Health Insurance (Medical/Vision/Dental)
• Unlimited PTO
• 11 Paid Company Holidays
• Paid Parental Leave
• 401k matching
• Annual professional development stipend
• Potential for equity
• Many others!

Beam provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.