Senior Site Reliability Engineer, IaaS

At Algolia, we’re proud to be a pioneer and market leader in AI Search, empowering 18,000+ businesses to deliver blazing-fast, predictive search and browse experiences at internet scale. Every week, we power over 30 billion search requests — four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo combined.

In 2021, we raised $150 million in Series D funding, quadrupling our valuation to $2.25 billion. This strong foundation enables us to keep investing in our market-leading platform and serving incredible customers like Under Armour, PetSmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens.

The team

The Infrastructure as a Service team is at the center of one of Algolia’s most consequential engineering transformations.

For years, Algolia has operated a production fleet of approximately 4,000 bare-metal servers to deliver the reliability, low latency, and scalability that our customers expect. We are now building the foundations of a unified cloud and Kubernetes platform designed to support Algolia’s growth for years to come.

This is not a lift-and-shift project. It is an opportunity to rethink how Algolia provisions, secures, operates, observes, upgrades, and scales production infrastructure and to build it as a platform that engineers can safely consume, rather than a queue of manual requests.

The opportunity

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer in IaaS, you will help shape the next generation of Algolia’s production infrastructure.

You will lead major parts of the Cloud Baseline and the reliable lifecycle capabilities that enable teams to operate and migrate workloads safely on a cloud-native platform. You will work across cloud foundations, Kubernetes, platform engineering, automation, reliability, and large-scale production operations.

This role is for an engineer who enjoys solving infrastructure problems where the answer must work not once, but hundreds or thousands of times: creating repeatable cloud environments, enabling a growing fleet of production clusters, reducing manual operations, and maintaining the reliability and cost efficiency our customers expect throughout the transition.

YOU WILL:

• Lead the design and evolution of Cloud Baseline capabilities across cloud providers, including identity and access, networking, account structure, security, auditability, tagging, inventory, and cost visibility.

• Design and automate cloud infrastructure foundations that enable a growing fleet of production Kubernetes clusters.

• Lead complex infrastructure initiatives, such as cloud-environment standardisation, cluster lifecycle automation, upgrade strategies, or infrastructure-drift reduction.

• Ensure cloud and Kubernetes foundations, lifecycle operations, and operational guardrails are reliable and scalable enough to support large-scale workload migration without compromising customer experience.

• Treat the platform as a product: define clear interfaces, reusable modules, self-service workflows, documentation, and reliable operational standards for the engineers who consume it.

• Build automated guardrails for security, compliance, reliability, and safe change management, allowing teams to move faster without weakening production protections.

• Improve platform efficiency through capacity planning, rightsizing, autoscaling, resource governance, and clear cost visibility.

• Use automation and AI-assisted engineering tools where appropriate to improve fleet-scale analysis, infrastructure documentation, and safe, repeatable operational changes.

• Mentor engineers, share knowledge, and raise the quality of infrastructure design and operations across the team.

• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, FinOps, and engineering teams to align technical decisions and deliver high-impact platform capabilities.

• Participate in the on-call rotation and lead the resolution of complex production issues.

YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU HAVE:

• Strong hands-on production expertise with AWS or GCP.

• Deep practical Kubernetes knowledge, including its cloud infrastructure dependencies and operational challenges.

• The ability to design, build, and operate reliable cloud infrastructure in production.

• Strong infrastructure-as-code and automation skills, ideally Terraform and Python, Go, or equivalent.

• Solid knowledge of Linux, networking, distributed systems, and production operations.

• A platform mindset: you design for the engineers who consume what you build, balancing velocity, correctness, security, and reliability.

• Awareness of cloud cost drivers and the ability to treat cost as an engineering constraint.

• A track record of leading complex technical initiatives and delivering durable solutions across teams.

• Comfort adopting AI-assisted engineering tools, with strong judgement for critical production systems.

• Excellent spoken and written English skills.

NICE TO HAVE:

• Familiarity with more than one public cloud provider.

• Knowledge of GitOps or policy-as-code tooling, such as Argo CD, Helm, OPA, or Kyverno.

• Exposure to cloud migration, platform engineering, FinOps, or large-scale infrastructure transformation.

FLEXIBLE WORKPLACE STRATEGY:

Algolia’s flexible workplace model is designed to empower all Algolians to fulfill our mission to power search and discovery with ease. We place an emphasis on an individual’s impact, contribution, and output, over their physical location. Algolia is a high-trust environment and many of our team members have the autonomy to choose where they want to work and when. 

We have a global presence with offices in Paris, NYC, London, Sydney and Bucharest, however we also offer many of our team members the option to work remotely either as fully remote or hybrid-remote employees. Positions listed as "Remote" are only available for remote work within the specified country. Positions listed within a specific city are only available in that location - depending on the role it may be available with either a hybrid-remote or in-office schedule.

WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO CAN LIVE OUR VALUES:

• GRIT - Problem-solving and perseverance capability in an ever-changing and growing environment.

• TRUST - Willingness to trust our co-workers and to take ownership.

• CANDOR - Ability to receive and give constructive feedback.

• CARE - Genuine care about other team members, our clients and the decisions we make in the company.

• HUMILITY - Aptitude for learning from others, putting ego aside.

We’re looking for talented, passionate people to help build the world’s best search and discovery technology. We value autonomy, diversity, and collaboration. We’re committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone is respected and supported—regardless of race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability, or socioeconomic background.

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR CANDIDATES - Recruitment Fraud Notice

We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams targeting job seekers. To help protect yourself, please keep the following in mind:

• Our open positions may appear on third-party job boards, but the best way to apply safely is directly through our careers page.

• All genuine communication from Algolia will come from an @algolia.com email address. If you receive an email from someone claiming to work at Algolia who does not have an @algolia.com email address, please do not respond or share any personal information.

• We’ll never ask for payments, purchases, or financial details during the hiring process.

READY TO APPLY?

If you share our values and our enthusiasm for building the world’s best search & discovery technology, we’d love to review your application!

Department: Production Engineering