Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Company Overview

Good Systems, the parent organization behind Goodnotes, empowers millions to capture and develop their ideas through innovative digital solutions. Goodnotes launched the foundation for a suite of products designed to blend human creativity with cutting-edge AI to transform how people interact with information.

Our mission is to enable individuals to transform thoughtful ideas into exceptional work.

Core Values

• Dream big: Embrace visionary and strategic thinking with openness to innovation.
• Build great things: Commit to serving users by continuously enhancing our products.
• Operate like an owner: Exhibit bold decision-making and a bias for action.
• Win like a sports team: Foster trust, collaboration, and empowerment.
• Learn and grow fast: Commit to rapid learning and iteration.
• Share our passion: Actively share ideas and enthusiasm.
• Be user obsessed: Demonstrate empathy, curiosity, and practicality.

Role Overview

We’re seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join the founding SRE team for New Goodnotes, our flagship next-generation product. You will take primary responsibility for operational excellence — ensuring high reliability, optimal performance, prompt problem detection, and efficient recovery when issues arise.

You will partner closely with Product and Platform Engineers to define reliability targets and improve infrastructure and application code. From investigating production incidents to implementing solutions, you will lead improvements and validate their effectiveness.

A unique aspect of this role is pioneering a "hands-free" SRE approach where autonomous agents manage routine operations, investigations, and recovery, escalating only when human judgment is necessary. You will build the tooling, execution platforms, and runbooks that empower this agentic SRE model.

This position offers a chance to shape a new team, establish engineering best practices, and demonstrate how a lean team can successfully operate a major product leveraging automation.

Key Responsibilities

• Own operational quality by defining availability, reliability, and performance goals, utilizing service-level objectives and error budgets to drive priorities and assess progress.
• Develop insightful observability through instrumentation, dashboards, and alerts that detect issues early and clarify their user impact.
• Investigate failure modes and drive resilient enhancements across code, infrastructure, and architecture.
• Build an agentic SRE platform that empowers autonomous agents with context, permissions, auditability, rollback, and escalation mechanisms.
• Lead incident response duties as first responder on call for New Goodnotes, coordinating recovery and facilitating clear communication with stakeholders.
• Leverage production incidents and near misses to improve systems, observability, and automation agents.
• Reduce operational toil by automating repetitive manual tasks to expand agent capabilities.
• Define production readiness standards and collaborate globally to integrate operational best practices and influence technical decisions with clear evidence.

Required Qualifications

• Extensive experience in Site Reliability Engineering or similar roles managing large-scale production software alongside sizeable engineering teams.
• Strong software engineering acumen including debugging unfamiliar codebases, diagnosing production issues, and delivering tested fixes.
• Hands-on expertise operating and troubleshooting production systems within AWS environments.
• Profound understanding of distributed systems, networking, databases, and typical failure modes affecting reliability and performance.
• Proven capability defining and measuring reliability targets with comprehensive observability via metrics, logging, tracing, and actionable alerts.
• Demonstrated experience managing production incidents, making critical decisions under pressure, and driving subsequent system improvements.
• Practical use of AI tools within engineering processes, combined with curiosity and judgement to advance autonomous operational workflows.
• Strong ownership mindset and effective communication skills to advocate technical trade-offs and drive cross-team improvements.

Preferred but Not Mandatory

• Background building AI agents, tooling integrations, or automated investigation and remediation pipelines.
• Experience assessing agent behaviors, recovery testing, and defining escalation protocols to humans.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code tools like Pulumi and container platforms such as Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of observability technologies like OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, or ClickStack.
• Prior involvement in founding or scaling SRE teams and practices.

Recruitment Process

• Initial conversation with Talent Acquisition to understand your background, motivation, and interest.
• Brief technical pre-screening interview with team member.
• AI-facilitated take-home technical assignment completed on your own schedule.
• Onsite interviews including role-specific technical assessment and values-based panel discussion.
• In-depth hiring manager interview focusing on professional experience and collaboration style.
• Discussion with AI champion about your AI proficiency and its role in your daily work.

Employee Benefits

• Personalized Growth & Wellness allowances for tools (e.g. noise-cancelling headphones), training, development, and health activities.
• Opportunities for global in-person collaboration through sponsored visits to company offices.
• Annual global offsites to celebrate achievements and foster team connections.
• Comprehensive medical insurance coverage for employees and one dependent.
• Hybrid work model with 4 in-office days per week and allowance for 18 remote workdays annually.

Diversity and Compliance

Goodnotes values diversity, inclusion, and equity, inviting applicants from all backgrounds. Employment decisions are strictly merit-based following background verification including employment, education, and criminal history checks. Applicants acknowledge understanding of our privacy practices upon application submission.