Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Release Engineering

Plaid

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
New York, NYSeattleSan Francisco, CA
Salary
$207,600–$273,600 / yr
Posted
68 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $181k
This role $241k
$127k $289k
below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 89% of similar roles. Most pay $146,250–$215,000 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $241k versus about $181k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Plaid

Plaid is a financial technology company that builds a data network powering digital finance applications, enabling consumers to securely connect their financial accounts to apps and services. Industry: Financial Technology & Data Infrastructure

Plaid currently has 73 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $190,800–$262,800 across 73 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Plaid

At a glance

TL;DR · Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Release Engineering

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Release Engineering, you will join the Infrastructure team to define and scale reliability practices across product engineering. You will architect SLO and error-budget programs, drive the adoption of progressive delivery, and ensure new products are production-ready. Your daily work involves translating complex production needs into intuitive, self-service tooling while managing canary rollout systems, metric-gated analysis, and automated rollback infrastructure. You will lead the expansion of reliability standards, guide teams through incident response, and prepare deployment systems for increased code velocity from AI-assisted development. The role requires technical proficiency in Go or similar systems languages, along with experience in Kubernetes, service mesh technologies, Prometheus, and ArgoCD to ensure safe, high-velocity shipping for production systems.

What does a Site Reliability Engineer earn in California?

Median $202800 from 62 postings across 16 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Define and scale reliability practices and standards across all product engineering teams.
  • Architect and manage the SLO and error-budget framework to guide strategic release choices.
  • Drive the adoption of progressive delivery, automated safety gates, and canary rollout systems.
  • Guide emerging product teams toward production readiness using observability and incident response expertise.
  • Translate complex production requirements into intuitive, self-service platform features and tooling.
  • Direct responses to critical incidents and ensure post-mortem actions result in permanent platform improvements.
  • Scale deployment safety nets to handle increased code velocity from AI-assisted development.

What we're looking for

  • Over 8 years of professional experience in backend systems, SRE, or platform engineering roles.
  • Proven track record of designing reliability programs, such as service maturity models or SLI frameworks, that achieved cross-team adoption.
  • Direct experience building or operating canary rollout systems, metric-gated analysis, or automated rollback infrastructure.
  • Technical proficiency in software development, with a preference for Go or similar systems languages (preferred).
  • Ability to drive organizational change and influence engineering culture without formal authority.
  • Sound technical judgment in high-stakes production scenarios, balancing user impact with developer velocity.
  • Prior exposure to Kubernetes, service mesh technologies, Prometheus, or ArgoCD is considered a strong asset (preferred).

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