---
title: 'Principal SRE at Backblaze External Website'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-sre-backblaze-external-website-united-states-ng3vg9gj0nep'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-06'
---

# Principal SRE at Backblaze External Website

- **Company:** Backblaze External Website
- **Location:** United States
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/backblaze/jobs/5450071008

## Job description

## About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Principal SRE to join our team!

## About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience collaborating in cross functional teams to manage the design, implementation and ongoing management of the Backblaze core infrastructure. You will be approved to demonstrate strong observability skills, process and service improvement and ability to leverage AI and automation to assist to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand..

As a technical leader in Backblaze you will be expected to work across the organisation to achieve our goals. This will include working with our executives and customers. The role will focus long term strategic focus on platform stability.

## Key Responsibilities

Service Reliability & Operations

- Own the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and accountability for outcomes.
- Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.
- Assist and advise on the design of service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk; partner with service owners to define/iterate SLIs/SLOs and establish error budget policies and alerting.
- Participate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
- Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).

Architect and Design

- Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
- Collaborate with engineering on overall storage design, performance expectation against product SLAs.
- Define the monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
- Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
- Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.

Collaboration

- Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
- Work with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products.
- Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
- Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.

Continuous Improvement

- Lead cross functional teams to identify gaps in observability, operations process and define overall prioritization strategy.
- Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing those improvements.
- Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.

## Qualifications

Education & Experience

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
- 10+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations, experience with hyperscalers preferred.
- Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems, including experience establishing operational procedures or runbooks and bringing others up to speed on them.

Technical Skills

- Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
- Proven ability to leverage AI tools to improve platform stability and scalability.
- Knowledge of storage systems, performance, sharding and storage algorithms.
- Experience in load balancing services including IPVS.
- Security-minded operations (patching, hardening, identifying vulnerabilities).
- Familiarity with service reliability concepts — monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
- Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).
- Experience working with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts required; comfortable operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces).
- Experience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform).

## Preferred Attributes

- Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
- Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA’s.
- Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

Backblaze Perks

- Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
- Competitive compensation and 401K
- RSU grants for full-time employees
- ESPP program
- Flexible vacation policy
- Maternity & paternity leave
- MacBook Pro to use for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation
- Childcare bonus (human children only)
- Fertility treatment and support
- Learning & development program
- Commuter benefits
- Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance

Pay Transparency

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.

The pay range for this position is $215,000 to $250,000 per year.

At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

To understand more about the data we collect and process as part of your application, please view our [Backblaze Employee Privacy Notice.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/63d32de856f6323a43a277f2/64b0660cd90ac9b4953f7f1d_Backblaze_HR_Employee_Related_Privacy_Notice.pdf)

## About Backblaze External Website

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Backblaze provides an independent cloud storage platform offering high-performance object storage, backup, and data management solutions to businesses and individuals worldwide.
- **Entity Type**: Public (ticker: BLZE on Nasdaq)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2007
- **Founders**: Gleb Budman, Tim Nufire, Billy Ng, Damon Uyeda, Casey Jones, Brian Wilson, Nilay Patel, Anuj Kumar (seven co-founders)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cloud storage, data backup, and object storage infrastructure.
- **Target customers**: B2B and B2C – serving over 500,000 customers in 175 countries, including enterprises, SMBs, and individual users.
- **Mission statement**: “To make customers unstoppable by solving their toughest data storage challenges.”

## Products & Services
- **Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage**: S3-compatible object storage designed for high-performance AI workflows, data-heavy applications, media management, and data protection. Offers advanced features like Event Notifications.
- **Backblaze Computer Backup**: Automated cloud backup for personal computers and small businesses.
- **Backblaze Cloud Backup**: Enterprise-grade backup for servers and cloud environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available in provided sources. As a public company (BLZE), current financials are available via SEC filings.
- **Key Metric**: Over 5 exabytes (5,053,404,320,000,000,000 bytes) of data storage under management; scaled with less than $3 million in outside funding until its 2021 IPO.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Minimal outside funding pre-IPO; no specific investors listed in provided sources. The company emphasizes its independence from hyperscaler clouds.
- **Growth Signals**: Remote-first global team; data centers in the US and Europe; expanding engineering and operations roles; growing customer base across 175 countries.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Independent cloud platform**: Not tied to the major hyperscalers, offering interoperability and freedom from lock-in.
- **S3-compatible API**: Simplifies integration with existing tools and workflows.
- **Engineered for efficiency**: Cost-effective storage built on a proprietary, lean infrastructure.
- **Sustainable business model**: “Rationally frugal” approach with focus on profitability and long-term success.
- **Cleverly unconventional culture**: Encourages novel solutions and simplicity.

## Strategic Focus
- Accelerating AI workloads and data-heavy applications with high-performance object storage.
- Expanding interoperability and advanced features (Event Notifications, S3 compatibility).
- Continuing to grow the remote-first, distributed engineering and operations team.
- Maintaining a sustainable, profitable growth trajectory.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-first**: Work from anywhere in the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia (India, Philippines). Great work can happen anywhere.
- **Culture and values**: Emphasis on transparency, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Values include “open communication,” “focus on easy,” “fair & good,” and “sustainable business.”
- **Benefits**: Comprehensive healthcare for family, dental & vision, 401(k) retirement plan, equity in a growing company, flexible paid time off, parental leave and reintegration support, learning & development program.
- **Engineering culture**: Teams include Site Reliability, Software Engineering (AI, backend, storage, security), QA, Developer Productivity, and more. Strong focus on solving complex storage challenges.

## Sources
1. [Backblaze Careers Page](https://www.backblaze.com/company/jobs)
2. [Backblaze About Page](https://www.backblaze.com/company/about)
3. [Backblaze Job Listings on Greenhouse](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/backblaze/jobs/5189029008)
4. [Backblaze LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/backblaze)

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