Staff Site Reliability Engineer I, Search Developer Platform

Etsy’s Search Developer Platform team is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer I to join us in our mission of building and supporting the core services that help Etsy buyers and sellers discover and celebrate handmade goods from all over the world. We own and operate all system components powering Etsy search and aim to utilize aggressive automation to ensure our infrastructure scales independently of the size of the team.

You’ll get exposure to a variety of technologies ranging from Kubernetes, Golang, LLMs, Model Serving, Search Retrieval & Ranking and more as you build and develop the services that support our 86M active buyers and 5.5M sellers!.

Do you find joy in improving developer velocity and have the itch to work on complex large-scale distributed systems? If so, this could be the perfect match!

This is a full-time position reporting to the Engineering Manager, Foundation. In addition to salary, you will also be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family as part of your total rewards package at Etsy.

This role requires your presence in Etsy’s Dublin office once or twice per week depending on your proximity to the office. Candidates living within commutable distance of our Dublin office may be the first to be considered. Learn more details about our work modes and workplace safety policies here.

What’s this team like at Etsy?

The Search Developer Platform team builds and operates the foundational platforms that power Etsy’s search ecosystem. We’re a group of engineers who enjoy working a layer below product features — designing systems, abstractions, and developer experiences that make complex search infrastructure reliable, scalable, and easy to adopt. Our work enables dozens of teams to move faster and safer, while keeping Etsy’s marketplace available and performant at massive scale.

This team works closely with many product and enablement teams across Etsy. On this team, you will:

• Take ownership of high-impact platform systems used across search, from Kubernetes-based runtime environments to CI/CD and deployment platforms.

• Work cross-functionally with platform engineers, ML teams, SREs, and product partners to define standards, evolve platforms, and influence technical direction while building the next generation of our high availability search platform in the cloud.

• Build developer-facing platforms and tooling (think self-service deploys, observability, Bazel workflows, and search-specific CI/CD) that reduce friction at scale.

• Operate with real responsibility — including on-call for business-critical systems — while continuously improving reliability, operability, and developer experience.

• Practice continuous learning and agile delivery model to stay informed and focused on our deliverables.

What does the day-to-day look like?

• Evolving the search platform by identifying areas of friction and implementing features that can measurably improve Developer Experience.

• Support the day-to-day operations of running large-scale applications, including monitoring, measuring, and troubleshooting infrastructure and services.

• Continually automate away toil that can be burdensome for teams.

• Participate in an on-call rotation and seek opportunities for reducing toil and avoiding technical debt to reduce support and operations load on the team.

• Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law.
  

Qualities that will help you thrive in this role are:

• You understand that being an effective software engineer is as much about communicating with people as it is about writing code.

• You have strong software engineering and coding skills and ability to write high performance production quality code. You have 6+ years of experience in software engineering, where the last 2 years are in systems/infrastructure engineering, or SRE or DevOps roles, preferably in a cloud environment.

• Experience iterating on multiple projects on a collaborative team, each of which may have taken months or longer to complete.

• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure As Code tooling like Terraform and configuration management tooling like Chef/Ansible.

• Hands on debugging experience with Linux based operating systems.

• Willing to work with and improve on code you did not originally write.

• Proficiency in one programming language like Go, Python, Java, or PHP is nice to have.

• You have solid background and hands-on experience with Cloud technologies like Google Cloud or AWS.

• Experience with search technologies such as Lucene/Solr, Elasticsearch, Vespa is a plus.

• Experience with Grafana, Kubernetes or Docker is a plus.