[Hiring] Senior Customer Reliability Engineer @Isovalent

Isovalent is the company founded by the creators of Cilium and eBPF. Isovalent builds open-source software and enterprise solutions solving networking, security, and observability needs for modern cloud-native infrastructure. The flagship technology, Cilium, is the choice of leading global organizations, including Adobe, AWS, Capital One, Datadog, GitLab, Google, and many more. Isovalent has headquarters in Cupertino, CA (US) and Zurich, Switzerland (EU) and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Google, M12 (Microsoft), Grafana Labs and Cisco Investments.

The Community you will join:

The Customer Reliability Engineering team sits under the Customer Success organization at Isovalent. The Customer Success team is composed of the Customer Reliability practice and the Solutions Architect practice. The goal of this community is to make Isovalent customers successful in their adoption journey of Cilium. This community drives deep customer engagement from initial architecture inception, through enablement and finally, into lowering operational anxiety as our customers head into production.

About this role:

As a Customer Reliability Engineer (CRE), you are the tip of the spear in interacting with our customers. Our CRE team adapts the best practices of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and applies them to our customers. As part of the role, you will gain a deep understanding of our customers, their architecture into their various configurations. The main mission of this role is to ensure that our customers can continue running Cilium Enterprise, reliably, at scale. You will work with various stakeholders, internally and externally to provide world-class support and issue resolution to various incidents and enhance our organization’s view into the health of our various customers. This role takes a proactive approach vs a reactive approach to customer reliability and you will use existing data to help us and our customers be aware of upcoming reliability risks.

A typical day:

• Reduce our customers’ production operational anxiety to near zero

• Collaborate with our solutions architects and engineering team to provide resolution to customer incidents

• Develop knowledge base articles that would help our customers accelerate time to resolution of previously identified issues

• Collaborate with our documentation team to promote any existing knowledge base articles to our official documentation site

• Conduct production readiness reviews with customer success team members and customers as they prepare to go into production

• Leverage data to assess any reliability impact on our customer base and provide critical communication to customers around Cilium Enterprise to maintain a high level of production reliability

• Create new customer reproduction environments and when necessary enhance existing or create new automation modules

• Lead retrospective activities for high-severity customer incidents

• Participate in an on-call rotation including weekends as necessary

Your Expertise:

• In-depth understanding of advanced Kubernetes architecture and its components

• Proven history in troubleshooting and resolving issues with Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies at a large production scale

• Comprehensive knowledge of Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) practices, including Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs), Customer Test Environments (CuTEs), tooling, monitoring, knowledge base creation, and retrospectives

• Extensive experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

• Strong familiarity with best practices in operating system security and their application in cloud-native technologies

• Commitment to knowledge sharing through the creation of valuable content for customers and internal stakeholders

• Emphasis on utilizing automation technologies for efficiency in handling repetitive tasks

Who we are:

Isovalent is driven by a simple goal: Building amazing technology and making our customers successful with it. Beginning with our open-source roots, building outstanding technology with a great team continues to be at the core of everything we do. We work every day to inspire our customers with our products and exceed their expectations. Beyond technology, many Isonauts share a love of the outdoors, running, hiking, skiing, climbing, and biking.

Our Core Values:

Remote First: We strongly believe in a remote-first philosophy. Our work and communication culture allows teams to be successful regardless of their location.

Mutual Respect: It is the cornerstone of our values to foster trust and create a safe space for growth and innovation and is at the heart of everything we do.

Open-Source & Transparency: Our culture is deeply rooted in Open Source principles. We thrive on openness, transparency, and inclusion.

Work & Adventure Balance: The work we do is very exciting and challenging. We encourage hard work but also encourage our team to take the time needed to recharge and balance life. We are here to support each other in that personal balance.

Personal Growth: This means different things to each of us and at Isovalent, we are dedicated to supporting your unique growth objectives, whatever they may be.

Why should you join us:

At Isovalent, our continuous endeavor is to create an environment where our Isonauts can embrace their authentic selves. Central to our daily operations is a deep-rooted commitment to mutual respect. We value and honor diverse perspectives, actively listening to one another. As a globally distributed team spanning nine time zones, we embrace the richness that our diverse locations bring.

At our company, we prioritize the well-being, motivation, focus, and creativity of our employees. With these objectives in mind, we have developed comprehensive wellness programs, tailored to their needs. We have cultivated a work environment that fosters a genuine love for what we do, and we believe you will feel the same.

Our benefits package varies by location and may include pension, 401K, health insurance, and more depending on the country of employment. We prioritize company-wide offsites to foster team connection, cross-department collaboration, and time to strengthen our relationships and culture. We offer a Flexible Time Off philosophy, encouraging a minimum number of days per year for rejuvenation. Our Mental Health and Wellbeing program supports individuals in finding their own strategies for work-life balance through activities like mindfulness and yoga, complemented by employee support channels and a monthly stipend. We offer inclusive parental leave and provide competitive compensation packages tailored to each role.

Isovalent is committed to fostering a culture that celebrates diversity, inclusion, and an authentic workspace. We understand that not everyone who applies from a more diverse background will meet all the requirements on day one. If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification, we encourage you to apply anyway. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there’s any way we can make the interview process better for you; we’re happy to accommodate!

Please note that benefits vary by country. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask our Talent Acquisition Partner.

As part of the hiring process, Isovalent may conduct a background check through a 3rd party with an applicant’s consent. Result of any background check will be considered as part of the hiring process, but may not necessarily disqualify a candidate from employment.

Minimum salary of $100,000 to maximum $180,000.

These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. The actual offer depends on various factors including geographic location and review of experience, knowledge, skills and abilities of the applicant. Compensation for the candidates outside of the US will vary depending on the local market.

Location: In this role, you can work remotely from the US, but must be available during the Pacific Standard Time Zone (PST) working hours.