Staff Software Engineer (L4)

About the job

Twilio is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join our Platform Engineering organization. SRE owns production health and resiliency at Twilio — we are accountable for whether our services stay available, performant, and recoverable for the customers who build their businesses on us. SREs here are software engineers who focus on reliability: you will architect systems with reliability designed in from the outset, define the SLIs and SLOs that determine whether we are meeting customer expectations, and build the automation that keeps our infrastructure efficiently ahead of capacity and performance demand.

At the Staff SRE you work without day-to-day guidance, applying deep subject-matter knowledge and industry-leading practice to improve the products, processes, and services that Twilio runs on. You will own the reliability posture of significant parts of our production estate. Your impact will be felt across multiple teams rather than within one.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will write and deploy code that improves service reliability, orchestrate complex changes across systems, lead the response when production is degraded, and raise the quality bar for the engineers around you.

Responsibilities

In this role, you’ll

• Own the reliability posture of production services in your area — availability, latency, capacity, efficiency, performance, and the monitoring and alerting that makes them visible

• Define, instrument, and operate against SLIs and SLOs, and use error budgets to drive engineering priorities

• Identify trends and problem areas that threaten stability, and provide a path forward to mitigate risk before it reaches customers

• Drive down repair items and prevent classes of incidents rather than resolving them one at a time

• Improve detection, response, and recovery — reducing time to acknowledge, engage, mitigate, and restore, with fewer people pulled in

• Design for failure: strengthen failure domains, validate recovery paths, and make production changes safer to ship and safer to roll back

• Participate in on-call for the services you support, and lead the response when production is degraded

• Write post-mortems that identify true root causes, and drive the follow-up work to completion

• Oversee efforts to identify, diagnose, report, and document production problems across all reliability dimensions

Qualifications

Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

*Required

• 8+ years of related engineering experience, with a substantial portion focused on reliability, infrastructure, or platform engineering

• Demonstrated accountability for production systems — you have carried a pager for services that mattered and owned the outcome when they failed

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: you build and ship production code, not only configure tooling

• Experience defining and operating against SLIs and SLOs, and using error budgets to inform engineering priorities

• Depth in production operations: incident command, post-mortem analysis, capacity planning, and observability

• A record of preventing recurrence — reducing incident classes and operational toil, not just closing tickets

• Experience driving changes that span multiple teams, and the communication skills to build alignment without formal authority

• A track record of improving the engineers around you through code review, design feedback, and mentorship

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems in a cloud environment

Desired

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, and GitOps-style delivery

• Experience with multi-region architecture, failure-domain design, or regional expansion work

• Background in chaos engineering, game…