[Hiring] Staff Site Reliability Engineer @GoDaddy

Role Description

This is a remote position, so you’ll be working remotely from your home. You may occasionally visit a GoDaddy office to meet with your team for events or meetings.

Join Our Team...

The Enablement team builds and operates the Linux Patching Automation (LPA) platform — a multi-cluster AWX automation system that patches every Linux host across GoDaddy's fleet. What started as a single-DC patching tool is now a multi-cluster, AI-integrated remediation system spanning multiple data centers. The team owns observability tooling (Loki, Mimir, Grafana, Alloy), ServiceNow integrations, and a system designed to identify and address vulnerabilities!

We need a Staff Engineer whose scope matches the platform's. This role owns the Automation Mesh multi-DC architecture, takes the AI-assisted vulnerability remediation pipeline from MVP to production, and establishes LPA's first service-level objectives and error budget framework. At this level you determine your own methods and procedures, shape the roadmap, and are the recognized technical voice for LPA across partner teams!

What you'll get to do...

• Own the Automation Mesh multi-DC architecture — failure domain reasoning, distributed locking, graceful degradation, and concurrency with LB-aware draining across data centers.
• Take the AI-assisted vulnerability triage and remediation pipeline from MVP to production: define triage accuracy SLOs, implement guard rails against mis-classified CI types, and expand coverage beyond the initial OS vulnerability scope.
• Own and drive down LPA onboarding lead time — establish cluster provisioning patterns, self-service runbooks, and a clear onboarding contract so what currently takes weeks completes in days.
• Define and own the platform's testing strategy — unit tests, molecule tests, and Execution Environment smoke-test contracts; close the open architectural decision on integration testing and build the foundation that lets the platform scale without quality regressions.
• Evolve LPA dashboards to fully replace legacy compliance reporting tooling; build alerting that surfaces patching SLA risk before it becomes a vulnerability ticket.
• Define LPA's first service-level objectives — patch delivery latency, automation success rate, alert-to-remediation lead time — and instrument them against an error budget, transforming LPA from a best-effort automation tool into a reliability-accountable platform.
• Mentor engineers on the team, lead cross-functional program delivery, and communicate architectural decisions to platform consumers and partner teams.
• Lead the team's AI tooling practice — co-authoring commits with LLMs is the team norm; the Staff Engineer sets the standard for how it's done.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on SRE, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering experience, including Staff or Principal-level scope.
• Ansible at scale — roles, collections, Execution Environment container builds, and lint pipelines; designing reusable role libraries, not just running playbooks.
• AWX / Ansible Automation Platform — Automation Mesh, Execution Environments, RBAC, and credential types; must have owned the platform at the architecture level, not just consumed it.
• Terraform / IaC — full infra-as-code lifecycle: cluster provisioning via tfvars-driven modules on OpenStack or comparable private cloud.
• Kubernetes / K3s operations — cordon/drain, etcd quorum, K8s-aware patching coordination; not just Helm deploys.
• ServiceNow integration — CMDB as dynamic inventory, Change Order workflows, VIT/vulnerability tracking; direct REST/API experience required.
• Systems architecture and distributed design — fault-tolerant, redundant systems at division scope: concurrency, locking, failure domains.
• AI / LLM integration in operations — LLM API integration in workflows; architecture-level AI application, not just prompt writing.
• Grafana / Prometheus / Mimir / Loki — building dashboards and alerting rules, not just reading them.
• Python scripting — owns and extends the AI vulnerability pipeline, Slack automation tooling, and utility scripts; not optional at Staff level.
• SLI / SLO / error budget — must have defined and instrumented service-level objectives and used error budgets to drive reliability trade-offs.
• Incident commander experience — on-call rotation ownership, postmortem facilitation; at Staff level you set the incident culture, not just participate in it.
• Technical mentorship — documented history of leveling up engineers through code review, pairing, architectural walkthroughs, or formal mentorship.
• Cross-functional program leadership — shipped projects requiring alignment across multiple teams without direct authority.

Requirements

• HashiCorp Vault — AppRole, PKI, IAM key rotation; our secrets model is Vault-first.
• HAProxy or other LB-aware patching / drain logic experience.
• Open source community participation — contributions, maintainership, or advocacy.
• cPanel / shared hosting fleet context — one of our larger customer segments.
• Formal technical decision documentation (ADR, RFC) at a prior employer.
• Database awareness — MySQL replica detection, Postgres-backed locking patterns.

Benefits

• Paid time off
• Retirement savings (e.g., 401k, pension schemes)
• Bonus/incentive eligibility
• Equity grants
• Participation in our employee stock purchase plan
• Competitive health benefits
• Other family-friendly benefits including parental leave