Senior SRE, Software Engineering

Job description

Collections runs like an emergency room. You show up in crisis, get triaged by a stranger who doesn't know your history and leave with no follow-up. We're turning it into primary care for consumer finance. We started in the hardest, most broken stage, because if it works there it works anywhere. 70 million Americans fall behind on a debt every year. Most want to pay what they owe and can't find a way back. We've serviced over $20 billion in debt across more than 20 million consumers. We see more people with charged-off loans each year than all but the top five US banks. They rate us about 50% higher than the banks that lent them the money. Creditors net over 30% more with us because we collect more and charge less. Most AI strips the human out of the work. We use it to do the opposite. In someone's hardest financial moment we make the experience more human. The more human we make it, the more people recover. Now we're moving upstream, catching people before they default and building across every stage of the consumer credit lifecycle. The consumer in collections today is the consumer who gets approved tomorrow. ABOUT THE ROLE As a Senior SRE you will ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of January's production and internal systems as we scale from thousands to millions of borrowers. You'll establish SRE practices from the ground up - architecting resilient infrastructure, implementing proactive monitoring solutions, and building sustainable on-call processes that evolve with our rapid growth. Your work will directly tackle our current scaling challenges including database optimization, async workflow infrastructure, and data pipeline reliability while ensuring our engineering team can ship with confidence. WHAT YOU’LL WORK ON - Lead incident response and establish sustainable on-call practices, including comprehensive runbooks, blameless postmortems, and systematic improvements that reduce MTTR - Develop and maintain self-service observability solutions using modern monitoring tools that provide actionable insights for troubleshooting and performance optimization - Create and maintain infrastructure as code (using Terraform, CloudFormation) that allows for consistent, scalable, and secure cloud environments on AWS - Partner closely with feature teams to architect resilient infrastructure for critical components (databases, networking, async workflows, data pipelines) that scale seamlessly - Work closely with DevX to design and implement robust CI/CD pipelines with advanced deployment strategies (blue/green, canary) that enable teams to ship confidently and rapidly - Advocate for best practices early in feature design, ensuring we design with reliability in mind and future-proof our services WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE - Expertise leading incident response for high-availability production systems, thorough root cause analysis, and fostering blameless postmortem culture - Experience designing highly available deployment architectures across multiple targets (e.g. EC2, Fargate), with expertise in auto-scaling, health checks, and graceful degradation strategies - Track record of implementing effective monitoring & observability solutions (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, ELK), and evangelizing best practices - Strong knowledge of AWS cloud services and infrastructure-as-code practices using tools like Terraform - Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation to enable reliable, efficient deployments - Excellent communication skills with experience documenting processes and collaborating across engineering teams We encourage you to apply even if your experience isn’t an exact match. We value professional development and on-the-job learning! HOW WE WORK - Decentralization beats control. The best calls get made by the people closest to them, not routed up a chain. You'll set the standards that let the team decide without you in the room. - Speed beats perfection. You run tight loops, act at 70% on reversible calls and adjust as you learn. Fast loops beat slow ones. - Candor beats comfort. You'd rather hear a hard truth early than a polite sidestep that wastes everyone's time. - Writing beats the average meeting. Clarity scales. - AI runs through everything here. We built our own code reviewer that beats the alternatives. Our voice AI handles most inbound calls with zero hallucinated payments. Engineers ship 3-4x the PRs they used to. You'll push it further into the work than almost any company you've worked at. - We operate at every altitude. No one here lives only on Mount Olympus, not even the leaders. We get into the trenches to learn the ground truth, then refine our information flows so ground truth climbs as fast as direction comes down. - We build in person, at least three days a week in our office in Nolita, with a growing group coming in every day. Random run-ins cross-pollinate ideas. Face time builds trust no thread can. Building alongside people makes work far more fun. We are currently hiring for this position in our New York office. As a New York City-based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, age, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.