--- title: 'Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Ethos Life' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-site-reliability-engineer-ethos-life-united-states-bbr835znmyc2' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-02' --- # Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Ethos Life - **Company:** Ethos Life - **Location:** United States - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-10-30 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-02 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ethoslife/jobs/8920490002 ## Job description ## About Ethos Ethos (Nasdaq: $LIFE) is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten. ## About the role Ethos is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a technical leader for our SRE organization in the US. In this role, you will help set the technical direction for how Ethos builds, runs, and scales production systems, from our core AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure to the internal platforms and toolchains that power our AI initiatives. This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with organization-wide scope. You will design and build critical infrastructure yourself, lead cross-team initiatives from conception to delivery, and raise the reliability bar across engineering by partnering closely with product teams, up to and including submitting PRs to their codebases. You will work alongside SRE leadership in the US and Bangalore to shape the roadmap, and you will be a go-to technical authority for reliability, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency. Duties and Responsibilities: Technical Leadership & Strategy - Set Direction: Define and drive the multi-quarter technical strategy for reliability, infrastructure, and platform tooling, in partnership with SRE and engineering leadership and aligned with company OKRs. - Architecture: Lead the design of complex, cross-cutting infrastructure systems. Author and review technical specifications and architecture proposals to ensure consistency, resilience, and long-term maintainability. - Influence Without Authority: Motivate product engineering teams to adopt reliability best practices, and act as a trusted advisor on production readiness when new services are designed and brought online. - Mentorship: Grow the technical skills of SREs across our US and Bangalore teams through design reviews, pairing, and code review, and help raise the hiring bar by participating in interviews. Reliability & Performance Engineering - Service Standards: Establish the framework for how teams define, measure, and act on SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets. Help teams instrument and monitor them. - Incident Excellence: Serve as a senior technical leader during high-severity incidents. Drive a culture of rigorous, blameless post-mortems and ensure follow-up work actually reduces recurrence. - Resilience: Lead capacity planning, disaster recovery, and failure-mode testing so our systems degrade gracefully and recover quickly. - Observability: Evolve our monitoring and alerting strategy so failures are detected before they impact customers and on-call is sustainable. Infrastructure & AI Platform Tooling - Scalable Systems: Design, build, and operate our AWS cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Kubernetes, and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Atlantis). - AI Gateway & Governance: Architect and build governed gateways for AI model routing, including model access controls, audit trails, and secure data connectors (such as MCP) that prevent sensitive data exposure. - Security & Compliance: Ensure infrastructure, including AI prototyping environments, meets security and regulatory requirements through automated scanning, PII guardrails, and scoped data access. Efficiency & Cost Optimization - FinOps: Lead initiatives to optimize cloud spend across the organization, including right-sizing, spot instance utilization, and cost attribution. - AI Cost Management: Design metering and budgeting for LLM token usage, and build cost-aware routing so workloads use the most efficient model for the job. - Visibility: Establish clear cost metrics and partner with engineering teams on architectures that are both performant and cost-effective. Developer Productivity - Paved Roads: Build internal tools, CI/CD pipelines, and self-service platforms that make the reliable path the easy path for product engineering teams. - Toil Elimination: Identify systemic sources of toil across engineering and automate them away. Qualifications and Skills: - Experience: 10+ years of full-time software engineering experience in relevant roles (SRE, Infrastructure, Platform, DevOps, or Backend SWE), including significant time operating production systems at scale. - Staff-Level Impact: A track record of leading complex, multi-team infrastructure or reliability initiatives from ambiguity to delivery, and of influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team. - Software Engineering: Strong coding skills in Golang, Python, or TypeScript, and a commitment to engineering best practices: design patterns, code reviews, and testing. - Cloud & Platform Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform. Experience building Kubernetes operators is a plus. - Systems Knowledge: Strong understanding of distributed systems, PostgreSQL, CI/CD systems, and observability tooling such as DataDog. - Reliability Practice: Hands-on experience implementing SLIs/SLOs, leading incident response, and running effective post-mortems. - Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication. You can write a clear design doc, explain trade-offs to executives, and build consensus across teams. - Mindset: A strong desire to remove toil from systems, and the judgment to balance reliability, velocity, and cost. ## Nice to Have - Experience building or operating LLM toolchains, such as AI gateways, model routing (e.g., Bedrock, Anthropic), and governance frameworks, including PII scanning and audit trails for model interactions. - Demonstrated experience leading cloud cost optimization or building usage metering systems. - Experience in regulated industries (insurance, fintech, healthcare) or with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2. - Experience collaborating with globally distributed teams. Our Tech Stack - Languages: TypeScript, Golang, Python - Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, Atlantis - Observability & Tools: DataDog, GitHub Actions, PostgreSQL - AI Platform: Anthropic, Bedrock, MCP #LI-Remote #LI-MK1 The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $156,000 - $275,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only and do not include applicable bonus, equity, or benefits. You can find further details of our US benefits at https://www.ethoslife.com/careers/ Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. At Ethos we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the SF Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrests and conviction records. To learn more about what information we collect and how it may be used, please refer to our [California Candidate Privacy Notice](https://res.cloudinary.com/getethos/image/upload/v1684458868/00_CMS/CURRENT_CRPA_Privacy_Notice_for_Job_Applicants_05-23.docx_-_Google_Docs_lr4j43.pdf). Recruitment Notice: Please be aware of recruitment scams. All legitimate communication from our team will only come from email addresses ending in @ethos.com or @getethos.com. We will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent us from a different email address, please treat it as fraudulent. ## About Ethos Life ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Ethos is a technology company that simplifies and accelerates the process of buying life insurance using AI-driven underwriting and a fully digital, vertically integrated platform. - **Entity Type**: Public (NASDAQ: LIFE) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2016 - **Founders**: Peter Colis (CEO), Lingke Wang ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Insurance (Insurtech / Life Insurance) - **Target customers**: B2C (consumers seeking life insurance), B2B (independent agents and brokers), and B2B (carrier partners). - **Mission or purpose statement**: "To protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale." [sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1788451/000119312526029993/d901135d424b4.htm) ## Products & Services - **Term Life Insurance**: Digital-first, fully online application and underwriting, with instant decisions for 95% of applicants. No medical exam required for many policies. - **Whole Life Insurance**: Permanent life insurance product with a cash value component, offered fully online. - **Indexed Universal Life (IUL) Insurance**: Flexible premium, permanent life insurance with growth potential tied to a market index. - **Accumulation IUL**: An IUL product focused on cash value accumulation. - **Supplemental Health Insurance**: Including Cancer Insurance and other health-related products. - **Wills & Estate Planning**: A digital service to create wills and estate plans, extending the company's role in long-term family financial planning. [ethos.com](https://www.ethos.com/) - **Agent OS**: An all-in-one operating system for independent agents that streamlines quoting, application submission, and policy management, enabling them to sell more policies efficiently. [sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1788451/000119312526029993/d901135d424b4.htm) ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Market Cap at IPO price (late 2025) was approximately $1.6B. Currently a public company; market cap fluctuates. Total funding prior to IPO was $606.5M. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethoslife) - **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue was **$387.6M** in the latest fiscal year. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethoslife) - **Key Metric**: **Over 500,000 policies activated** since inception. As of Sept 30, 2025, over **10,000 active selling agents** on the platform. [sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1788451/000119312526029993/d901135d424b4.htm) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund, Jay-Z, Kevin Durant, Robert Downey Jr. [job-boards.greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ethoslife) - **Growth Signals**: Revenue grew **60%** (from $160M to $255M) from FY2023 to FY2024. Headcount grew **35.5%** YoY. Expanded product lineup from 1 product in 2019 to 10 by end of 2024. Achieved GAAP profitability in 2023 and has maintained positive net income. Named to CB Insights' Global Insurtech 50 list and BuiltIn's Top 100 Midsize Companies in San Francisco. [sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1788451/000119312526029993/d901135d424b4.htm) ## Competitive Advantages - **Proprietary AI Underwriting Engine**: Ingests up to 250,000 data points per application (prescription history, credit scores, MVRs) to assess risk instantly and individually, leading to 95% of applicants getting a decision in minutes vs. weeks for traditional insurers. [sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1788451/000119312526029993/d901135d424b4.htm) - **Asset-Light, Scalable Model**: Does not take balance sheet risk; partners with carriers for underwriting. This allows rapid scaling and high gross margins (97-98%). - **Vertically Integrated Tech Stack**: Full-stack, cloud-native platform handles everything from distribution to underwriting, activation, and administration, creating a seamless experience and durable network effects across consumers, agents, and carriers. - **Strong Network Effects**: As the platform scales and collects more data, the underwriting engine improves, which improves conversion and attracts more agents and carriers, creating a self-reinforcing flywheel. ## Strategic Focus - **Product Expansion**: Rapidly adding new life insurance and adjacent financial products (IUL, estate planning, supplemental health). - **Agent & Channel Growth**: Scaling the independent agent channel via Agent OS, while maintaining a strong direct-to-consumer channel. - **International Expansion**: Operating in 10 countries (including India, Singapore, Canada, Lithuania), with significant engineering and operations hubs in Bangalore, India. - **Continued AI & Data Science Moat**: Deepening the proprietary underwriting engine's capabilities to further improve conversion, pricing, and risk selection. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Described as having "intellectual rigor," a "bias for impact," and a "one-team, one-dream mentality." Employees are empowered to dream big and execute quickly with minimal red tape. Values include "speak your mind" and "serve our families." [ethos.com](https://www.ethos.com/careers/) - **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: "Digital-first" company. Over half of the team is remote across the US. Has offices in San Francisco, Bangalore, and Singapore. Many roles are "Remote US." [ethos.com](https://www.ethos.com/careers/) - **Compensation & Benefits**: - Top-tier medical, dental, vision insurance. - 401(k) plan with company contributions. - Generous paid time off + full company holiday schedule. - **100% wage replacement** for new parents during parental leave; coverage for family planning and fertility. - **Company equity** for all employees. [ethos.com](https://www.ethos.com/careers/) - **Impact**: Employees report having "outsized impact and true ownership" over successes, with the chance to "revitalize an industry for good." [ethos.com](https://www.ethos.com/careers/) - **Growth Trajectory**: Rapidly growing (35%+ headcount growth), with recent IPO strength and a clear, well-funded path to market leadership in a massive, legacy industry. ## Sources 1. [ethos.com](https://www.ethos.com/) 2. [ethos.com/careers/](https://www.ethos.com/careers/) 3. [job-boards.greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ethoslife) 4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethoslife) 5. [sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1788451/000119312526029993/d901135d424b4.htm) ## Other roles at Ethos Life - [Support Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/support-operations-manager-ethos-life-bengaluru-wpvdqmbm52zk) — Bengaluru, India - [Senior Director, Offline Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-director-offline-marketing-ethos-life-united-states-85x1xwbxz4bn) — United States - [Senior Copywriter, Performance Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-copywriter-performance-marketing-ethos-life-united-states-0mqskevz5psm) — United States - [Partnership Operations Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/partnership-operations-associate-ethos-life-bengaluru-48hnh9hxke0e) — Bengaluru, India - [Senior Marketing Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-marketing-designer-ethos-life-bengaluru-9btsq8n8adb1) — Bengaluru, India - [Senior Manager, Distribution & Revenue Strategy](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-distribution-revenue-strategy-ethos-life-united-states-gnxwb4gxrf6m) — United States - [Product Support Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/product-support-associate-ethos-life-bengaluru-bsk9qnpb420x) — Bengaluru, India - [Director, Life Underwriting](https://feeny.ai/job/director-life-underwriting-ethos-life-bengaluru-t8fkwry4q9a6) — Bengaluru, India - [Director of Sales Development & Training](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-sales-development-training-ethos-life-united-states-z2aw884qzm67) — United States - [CX Trainer](https://feeny.ai/job/cx-trainer-ethos-life-bengaluru-ek0p26qr1bz0) — Bengaluru, India