Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Core Cloud Engineering

Our Engineering team at Vultr is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Core Cloud Engineering to report to the Director of Core Cloud Engineering. This role demands deep expertise in large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure automation, and production operations of hypervisor platforms and the control plane. The ideal candidate will combine hands-on systems engineering with a focus on reliability, scalability, and observability, ensuring Vultr’s cloud services remain performant and resilient for our 1.5 million users.

Key Responsibilities

• Production Control Plane Operations: Operate and scale Vultr’s control plane, ensuring availability, correctness, and performance across global datacenters.
• Hypervisor & Infrastructure Reliability: Design, implement, and maintain automation to manage hypervisor fleets (KVM, QEMU, libvirt) and supporting infrastructure at scale.
• Networking & Systems Automation: Develop tooling and automation for Open vSwitch (OVS), BGP routing, and other networking components to ensure resilient and self-healing network operations.
• Performance & Reliability Tuning: Continuously analyze and improve system performance across compute, storage, and network layers, with an emphasis on reducing toil and eliminating single points of failure.
• Observability & Incident Response: Implement advanced monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions (Grafana, Sentry, SumoLogic) while leading incident response to minimize impact and drive postmortem culture.
• CI/CD & Configuration Management: Maintain and evolve infrastructure pipelines (GitLab CI/CD, Puppet) to enable safe, fast, and reliable changes to both control plane and hypervisor infrastructure.
• Collaboration: Work closely with Software Engineers, Network Engineers, and Product teams to align platform reliability with business and user needs.
• Documentation & Standards: Produce clear technical documentation for runbooks, operational procedures, and automation frameworks to improve team efficiency and reliability standards.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Coach and mentor team members in best practices for site reliability, incident handling, automation, and low-level Linux systems debugging.

Qualifications 

• Proficiency in PHP with strong scripting and automation skills.
• Experience running large-scale distributed systems and control plane infrastructure in production.
• Strong background in hypervisor technologies (libvirt, QEMU, KVM) and Linux systems administration.
• Expertise in networking protocols and tools, particularly BGP and Open vSwitch (OVS), with automation experience.
• Deep knowledge of observability and monitoring frameworks (Grafana, Sentry, SumoLogic) and incident management.
• Advanced troubleshooting skills across compute, networking, and storage subsystems.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitLab) and configuration management (Puppet).
• Familiarity with MySQL or similar databases, with an understanding of operational considerations for reliability and scale.
• Strong problem-solving abilities and the drive to tackle complex, low-level reliability challenges.
• Effective cross-team communication and collaboration skills.
• A commitment to continuous improvement and fostering a culture of operational excellence.