Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Job description

Hi there! Thanks for stopping by 👋 Are you actively looking for a new opportunity? Or just checking the market? Well… you might just be in the right place! We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join our Data team in Canada. As a Staff Data SRE, you are the technical backbone of the Data Office's infrastructure platform. Your scope spans the entire Data Business Unit — you solve systemic, platform-level problems, not individual tickets. You own the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of the data platform, and you act as a force multiplier: making the engineers around you faster, the systems more resilient, and the platform easier to consume. You bring deep GCP expertise and a product mindset to data infrastructure. You are comfortable navigating ML/AI workload requirements (Vertex AI, feature stores, training pipelines) and can reason confidently about the BI tooling and data layers that feed it (Looker, BigQuery). Your decisions carry weight across teams, and you communicate them clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders. Please note this role is based in Montreal, Canada. What you’ll be doing: - You will own and be accountable for advancing the Data Office infrastructure engineering practices and delivering high-leverage platform projects. Your time will be distributed as follows: - 70% – Hands-On Engineering & Platform Ownership: Design and deliver significant infrastructure improvements. You write production-quality IaC (Terraform), lead solutions from design through delivery, and are the person the team calls for the hardest platform problems. This includes data infrastructure for batch/streaming workloads, ML/AI environments (Vertex AI, model serving, GPU-backed compute), and the BI serving layer (Looker infrastructure and GCP integration). - 10% – Team Coordination & Technical Leadership: Lead architecture and design discussions for larger cross-team projects. You review critical PRs, drive solution design sessions, and provide technical direction that keeps the team coherent and moving forward. - 10% – General Meetings: Lead conversations in agile ceremonies, incident reviews, and cross-functional syncs. You shift from participant to driver. - 10% – Mentorship & Technical Review: Actively mentor Senior and Intermediate SREs. You set the bar for IaC quality, observability practices, and operational discipline through reviews, pairing, and documentation. - Avoiding Pitfalls: You proactively identify risks in complex data migrations or infrastructure changes and propose mitigation strategies to ensure zero data loss and minimal downtime. And a little bit of… - Participating in on-call rotation and incident response. - Contributing as part of the wider team to achieve organization-wide objectives even if this means doing things that aren't strictly within the scope of your role. What you need to bring: - GCP Infrastructure: Deep expertise across GCP compute, networking, IAM, GKE, data services, and FinOps. - IaC Proficiency: Terraform as primary tool. - Hands-on experience with Looker infrastructure and ML/AI platform tooling (Vertex AI, model serving, training pipelines). - Proficient in Bash and Golang; Python a plus for data tooling. - Strong experience with metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and SLO/SLI design, DataDog,... - Product Mindset: You focus on making the platform easy to use, not just "available." - Experience with Github actions, Circle CI, GCP Cloud Build, … - Ability to communicate infrastructure trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders. - AI proficiency, Go-to AI expertise within the Data BU — evaluates tooling, drives cross-team AI-first development practices. - Security-First Mindset, every design decision evaluated through a security and compliance lens. - Self-awareness with a willingness to learn and improve. - Ability to mentor and train other Engineers in the team. Be a change maker You’ll enjoy: - A flexible work environment that empowers you to do your best work - A culture that celebrates performance - The chance to make an impact in a team that’s big enough for career growth, but lean enough to make your voice heard - Career-defining opportunities Plus benefits designed to keep you happy, healthy and fulfilled. - Flexible paid time off and remote work policies - Equity options, because this is your company too - Contributions to your pension plan. Your future matters - Training opportunities to grow your skills and career - Health and wellness credit so you feel your best - Time off to volunteer and give back to your community - Interest groups, employee led networks, social committees to sponsored sports teams - Computer purchase program to get your personal Macbook - Enhanced parental leave to support growing families Fuel your growth. Find your people. At Lightspeed, your growth is our priority. We invest in you with continuous learning opportunities, global mobility and benefits designed to support you—all within a driven, diverse and inclusive team that’s passionate about empowering our communities Please note that we ask applicants to disclose any criminal convictions, and we conduct criminal record checks as part of our hiring process for this role. To all recruitment agencies: Lightspeed does not accept unsolicited agency resumes. If we have not directly engaged your company in writing to supply candidates for a specific vacancy, Lightspeed will not be responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. Lightspeed is a proud equal opportunity employer and we are committed to creating an inclusive and barrier-free workplace. Lightspeed welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. WHERE TO FROM HERE? Obviously, this has to be mutually beneficial: we want you to step into a role you love, and we want to offer you a place you’re proud to come to every day. For a glimpse into our world check out our career page here https://www.lightspeedhq.com/careers/. Lightspeed is building communities through commerce, and we need people from all backgrounds and lived experiences to do that. We were founded in 2005, in Montreal’s gay village and our original members were all part of the LGBTQ+ community. The ethos of our business has been about inclusion from the very beginning, and we strive to provide a workplace where everyone belongs. WHO WE ARE: Powering the businesses that are the backbone of the global economy, Lightspeed's one-stop commerce platform helps merchants innovate to simplify, scale, and provide exceptional customer experiences. Our cloud commerce solution transforms and unifies online and physical operations, multichannel sales, expansion to new locations, global payments, financial solutions, and connection to supplier networks. Founded in Montréal, Canada in 2005, Lightspeed is dual-listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: LSPD) and Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: LSPD). With teams across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, the company serves retail, hospitality, and golf businesses in over 100 countries. Lightspeed handles your information in accordance with our Applicant Privacy Statement https://www.lightspeedhq.com/legal/applicant-privacy-statement/.