
Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Bluesky (Remote)
Bluesky· $200k–$270k·
Role details
Job description
About Us
Bluesky's mission is to transition the social web from platforms to protocols. We're building a federated social network called AT Protocol where users have more power. Our small team has decades of combined experience building distributed applications.
About the Role
We're looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to help design, implement, and operate the infrastructure that powers Bluesky and atproto. This is a hands-on role for someone who has operated high-scale production systems, understands how distributed systems fail, and wants to build the operational foundation for an open social network.
Key Responsibilities
- You'll work across bare-metal systems, cloud services, data infrastructure, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and reliability engineering for systems serving millions of users.
- Own reliability, availability, and operational excellence for our production systems, including observability, incident response, deployment, and rollback systems
- Improve production readiness for services, migrations, and infrastructure changes
- Develop software that pushes the state of the art in performance, automation, observability, and other areas
- Scale systems running on dense, latest-generation, bare-metal servers in our own colocation facilities
- Reduce toil through automation, tooling, and thoughtful engineering practices
- Partner with engineers across all our teams to help design services with strong operational characteristics
- Lead incident reviews and turn contributing factors into concrete engineering improvements as we practice continuous improvement
- Perform capacity planning and cost management across compute, storage, database, and networking workloads
- Manage various vendor relationships to ensure we can provide high quality services at a reasonable TCO
- Mentor engineers on reliability, operability, debugging, and distributed systems practices and help define a culture of operational excellence across the org
You might be a good fit if you
- Have +10 years experience operating high-scale production systems, including bare metal
- Have strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, storage, databases, and distributed systems
- Have built and operated high-scale systems where correctness, latency, throughput, and availability were critical
- Can write production-quality software in Go
- Are comfortable debugging across application code, operating systems, databases, networks, and hardware
- Have experience with observability systems, alert design, incident response, capacity planning, kubernetes, and production automation
- Like working on very small, fast-moving teams at a startup
- Have read the AT Protocol docs, feel aligned with the mission, and want to contribute!
We're a fully remote team, but an overlap of working hours with PST is required, as is willingness to travel to team meetups once every 3-4 months. Please note, there may be an on-site component to these interviews. We offer health, dental, and vision insurance.
Additional Notes Equity will be considered in the total compensation package. The final base salary for this role will be based on the individual's geographic location, as well as experience level, skill set, training, licenses and certifications.
Why work at Bluesky
- Remote-first culture: The company is fully remote but expects some overlap with Pacific Time (PST). Employees are distributed across 12+ countries, including the US, Philippines, Japan, UK, and Germany.
- Small, nimble team: With ~42 employees, new hires can have significant impact on core product and protocol decisions. The engineering team is ~15 people.
- Open-source ethos: Engineers work on open-source code (AT Protocol, app clients, moderation tools) that is visible to the public. This is a strong draw for developers who value transparency and community contribution.
- Mission-driven: Employees are building a social network that is designed to be resilient to corporate takeover and censorship, which resonates with many candidates.
- Notable perks: While not detailed publicly, the company offers the flexibility of remote work, equity in a rapidly growing startup, and the opportunity to shape the future of decentralized social media.
- Recent leadership: Jay Graber (CEO/Innovation Officer), Paul Frazee (CTO), Rose Wang (COO) are hands-on leaders with deep backgrounds in decentralized tech and product development.