Principal Site Reliability Engineer

About the Role

As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will serve as a technical leader responsible for the reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence of Accela's Civic Platform. You will partner closely with Engineering, DevOps, Database Engineering, Security, and Architecture teams to evolve our cloud platform, modernize infrastructure, and ensure our SaaS offerings remain highly available, secure, and cost-effective at scale.

This role combines deep technical expertise with strategic influence. You will drive reliability initiatives, define operational standards, mentor engineers, and lead complex technical efforts that improve the resiliency and efficiency of our platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as a technical leader for reliability engineering, operational excellence, and platform modernization across the Civic Platform
• Drive platform modernization initiatives from VM-based architectures toward containerized and cloud-native services in partnership with DevOps, Database Engineering, Security, and Development teams
• Lead efforts to improve availability, performance, scalability, security, and cost efficiency of Accela's SaaS offerings
• Define, implement, and operate service level objectives (SLOs), service level agreements (SLAs), and error budgets for critical platform services
• Lead observability initiatives across metrics, distributed tracing, logging, and monitoring platforms
• Drive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) efforts for complex production incidents and facilitate blameless postmortems
• Design, develop, and maintain automation, tooling, and software solutions that improve reliability and operational efficiency
• Serve as senior technical escalation point during production incidents and for platform changes
• Partner with Security and Compliance teams to ensure operations meet SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and PCI-DSS requirements
• Translate operational metrics and reliability trends into actionable insights for engineering leadership
• Mentor engineers across the Cloud Engineering organization and influence engineering best practices

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of Site Reliability Engineering, Software Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, or related disciplines within SaaS environments
• Demonstrated technical leadership driving platform reliability and complex technical initiatives
• Deep knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Strong experience designing and operating highly available, scalable systems at enterprise scale
• Expertise in observability platforms, monitoring, distributed tracing, and incident response
• Experience with compliance frameworks including SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, or similar regulatory standards

Salary Disclosure: This listing does not include employer-provided compensation data. The estimated salary range of $80,000–$130,000 USD annually is an editorial market estimate based on role level, technology stack, and location. Actual compensation may vary significantly based on experience, qualifications, location, and other factors.