Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE

About January

At January, we’re transforming the lives of borrowers by bringing humanity to consumer finance. Our data-driven products empower financial institutions to streamline collections and help borrowers regain financial stability and control over their lives. We’re not just expanding access to credit — we’re restoring dignity and paving the way for millions to achieve financial freedom.

About the Role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will establish SRE practices from the ground up — ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance as January scales from thousands to millions of borrowers. You’ll architect resilient infrastructure, design modern observability solutions, and build sustainable on-call processes that evolve with our rapid growth.

Your work will directly address scaling challenges including database optimization, async workflow infrastructure, and data pipeline reliability — enabling the engineering team to ship confidently and efficiently.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead incident response and develop sustainable on-call practices, including runbooks, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement to reduce MTTR.
  
• Build and maintain self-service observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, ELK) for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting.
  
• Create and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform or CloudFormation for consistent, secure AWS environments.
  
• Partner with development teams to architect resilient, scalable infrastructure for critical components like databases, networking, async workflows, and data pipelines.
  
• Design and implement robust CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) with advanced deployment strategies (blue/green, canary).
  
• Drive best practices in reliability and performance early in the design phase to future-proof January’s systems.
  

Required Skills & Experience

• Proven experience leading incident response and postmortem processes for high-availability production systems.
  
• Deep expertise in designing highly available architectures (EC2, Fargate, auto-scaling, health checks, graceful degradation).
  
• Strong experience with AWS cloud infrastructure and IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation).
  
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD automation using GitHub Actions or equivalent tools.
  
• Proficiency in observability and monitoring stacks (Datadog, Prometheus, ELK).
  
• Solid scripting/programming skills in Python (for automation, tooling, and debugging).
  
• Excellent communication and documentation skills, with the ability to collaborate across engineering and platform teams.
  

Requirements

Tools & Technologies

• Cloud: AWS
  
• IaC: Terraform, CloudFormation
  
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
  
• Monitoring: Datadog, Prometheus, ELK
  
• Languages: Python
  
• Infrastructure: EC2, Fargate
  

Additional Details

• Remote role (NYC-based preferred for hybrid collaboration).
  
• Opportunity to build and own the entire SRE practice for a growing FinTech startup.
  
• Fast-paced, innovative environment working on AI-forward consumer finance products.