Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Job description

ABOUT NOVELLIA Novellia is the first and only company that lets anyone in the U.S. gain access to nearly a decade of their health data in under 30 seconds — 100% free. All your health records, across every doctor, in one place, always up to date. We are the only patient-powered real-world data platform delivering comprehensive, patient-authorized longitudinal health insights to accelerate biopharma innovation. Unlike traditional RWD providers who deliver fragmented institutional data, we empower patients to access 20+ years of their health records, then transform these complete health journeys into fit-for-purpose datasets for evidence generation, regulatory submissions, and market access. We are growing 5x year over year, have raised close to $30M in funding, and are backed by tier-1 investors including Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Bling Capital. Working with the world's top researchers, we turn health insights into life-changing action for millions of people around the world. ABOUT THE ROLE Novellia is a Series A health tech startup, and we're hiring our first Site Reliability Engineer. You'll join Platform Engineering as its second member, working directly with the Head of Platform Engineering to establish the reliability foundations the company will build on for years. "First SRE" means most interesting problems are still unsolved. There is no runbook to inherit. You'll help decide what we monitor, how we deploy, what "reliable enough" means for a product handling health data, and how engineering teams interact with production. Your fingerprints will be on all of it. We believe reliability is a problem-solving discipline, not a tooling discipline. Sometimes the right fix is code or infrastructure. Just as often it's a better process: a clearer escalation path, a lighter-weight change review, an on-call rotation that doesn't burn people out, or a conversation that gets two teams aligned on an SLO. We're looking for someone who reaches for whichever solution actually fits the problem, and who enjoys working with stakeholders to figure out what the problem really is before solving it. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design the human side of reliability: on-call rotations, incident roles and communication, blameless postmortems, and change management that adds safety without adding drag. - Help shape the platform roadmap: bring us the problems you're seeing, propose solutions, and own them through to adoption. - Build and operate the core reliability toolkit: observability (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting), CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and incident response. - Embed with product engineers to make services more operable, and to raise the operational literacy of the whole team rather than becoming its single point of failure. - Define our first SLOs in partnership with product and engineering stakeholders, grounded in what actually matters to patients and customers rather than what's easy to measure. - Investigate incidents and recurring pain end to end, and be equally willing to conclude "this needs a process change" as "this needs a code change." - Contribute to the compliance and security posture that health data demands (audit trails, access controls, environment isolation), working alongside the Head of Platform Engineering. Reliability here is also about patient trust: people share their health history with us because we're transparent about how it's handled, and the systems you keep running are what make that promise real. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 5+ years in SRE, platform, DevOps, or backend roles with meaningful production ownership: you've carried a pager, owned services through real incidents, and made systems measurably better afterward. - Comfortable in at least one general-purpose language (Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar), and willing to go into application code and change it when that's where the fix lives. This isn't about cleaning up someone else's work; it's about having skin in the game and being ready to lean in when a problem calls for it. - A track record of solving problems, not just closing tickets. You can walk us through real problems you identified, how you decided what to do, and what changed as a result. - Evidence you treat process as a legitimate engineering tool: you've improved a review workflow, restructured an on-call, introduced a postmortem practice, or otherwise fixed something by changing how people work. - Strong collaboration instincts: you seek out the people affected by a problem, listen well, write clearly, and bring stakeholders along rather than presenting them with a finished decision. - Self-directed and used to operating without a playbook. You'll get problems and a close working partner, not a queue of tasks, and you're comfortable setting direction others will build on. NICE TO HAVE - Experience in a regulated environment (healthcare, fintech) or working with HIPAA, SOC 2, or similar frameworks. - You've been an early or first infrastructure/reliability hire and know what greenfield ownership actually feels like day to day. - Experience introducing reliability practices to teams that didn't have them. WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT Honest scoping, so we find the right match: - Not a pure tools role. If you want to go deep on one system and hand the human problems to someone else, this won't fit. - Not a large-team role yet. We're building the team; today you'd be one of two in Platform Engineering. That means breadth, visibility, and influence, and also fewer specialists to lean on. - Not a firefighting-only role. We're early enough to build things right rather than only patching what's on fire. WHY THIS ROLE IS A GOOD BET - Ground-floor ownership of reliability at a funded, growing company, with direct influence on architecture, process, and eventually hiring. - A manager whose explicit goal is to build a healthy engineering organization, and who values process and people solutions rather than treating them as overhead. - Health tech means the reliability work has stakes that matter. Real patients depend on what you keep running, and on us handling their data with the privacy and transparency we promise them. BENEFITS & PERKS - Equity in Novellia - Medical, dental, and vision coverage - 401(k) - Flexible time off - Wellness stipend - Up to 12 weeks of parental leave Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Novellia, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so 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 anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles. U.S. Applicants Only