Remote Principal SRE Jobs
Remote Principal SRE jobs are open across the U.S. at remote-first companies and distributed engineering teams hiring for this senior role in cloud infrastructure, platform reliability, and enterprise software. Employers hiring remotely right now include Backblaze, BAE Systems USA, and Collins Aerospace. Scan the live roles below and apply to whichever ones fit.
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About Backblaze
Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.
Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.
But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Principal SRE to join our team!
About the Role
We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience collaborating in cross functional teams to manage the design, implementation and ongoing management of the Backblaze core infrastructure. You will be approved to demonstrate strong observability skills, process and service improvement and ability to leverage AI and automation to assist to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand..
As a technical leader in Backblaze you will be expected to work across the organisation to achieve our goals. This will include working with our executives and customers. The role will focus long term strategic focus on platform stability.
Key Responsibilities
Service Reliability & Operations
- Own the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and accountability for outcomes.
- Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.
- Assist and advise on the design of service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk; partner with service owners to define/iterate SLIs/SLOs and establish error budget policies and alerting.
- Participate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
- Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).
Architect and Design
- Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
- Collaborate with engineering on overall storage design, performance expectation against product SLAs.
- Define the monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
- Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
- Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.
Collaboration
- Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
- Work with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products.
- Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
- Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.
Continuous Improvement
- Lead cross functional teams to identify gaps in observability, operations process and define overall prioritization strategy.
- Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing those improvements.
- Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.
Qualifications
Education & Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
- 10+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations, experience with hyperscalers preferred.
- Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems, including experience establishing operational procedures or runbooks and bringing others up to speed on them.
Technical Skills
- Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
- Proven ability to leverage AI tools to improve platform stability and scalability.
- Knowledge of storage systems, performance, sharding and storage algorithms.
- Experience in load balancing services including IPVS.
- Security-minded operations (patching, hardening, identifying vulnerabilities).
- Familiarity with service reliability concepts — monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
- Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).
- Experience working with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts required; comfortable operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces).
- Experience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform).
Preferred Attributes
- Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
- Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA’s.
- Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Backblaze Perks
- Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
- Competitive compensation and 401K
- RSU grants for full-time employees
- ESPP program
- Flexible vacation policy
- Maternity & paternity leave
- MacBook Pro to use for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation
- Childcare bonus (human children only)
- Fertility treatment and support
- Learning & development program
- Commuter benefits
- Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance
Pay Transparency
To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.
The pay range for this position is $215,000 to $250,000 per year.
At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.
To understand more about the data we collect and process as part of your application, please view our Backblaze Employee Privacy Notice.
About Backblaze
Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.
Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.
But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Principal SRE to join our team!
About the Role
We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production systems. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience collaborating in cross functional teams to manage the design, implementation and ongoing management of the Backblaze core infrastructure. You will be approved to demonstrate strong observability skills, process and service improvement and ability to leverage AI and automation to assist to mitigate issues faster and meet customer demand..
As a technical leader in Backblaze you will be expected to work across the organisation to achieve our goals. This will include working with our executives and customers. The role will focus long term strategic focus on platform stability.
Key Responsibilities
Service Reliability & Operations
- Own the availability and durability of critical services across production environments and accountability for outcomes.
- Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.
- Assist and advise on the design of service health metrics using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk; partner with service owners to define/iterate SLIs/SLOs and establish error budget policies and alerting.
- Participate in leadership on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
- Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).
Architect and Design
- Design automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
- Collaborate with engineering on overall storage design, performance expectation against product SLAs.
- Define the monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
- Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
- Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.
Collaboration
- Partner with engineering, customer success, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
- Work with customers to ensure stability prioritization is based around their needs and experiences in using Backblaze products.
- Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
- Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.
Continuous Improvement
- Lead cross functional teams to identify gaps in observability, operations process and define overall prioritization strategy.
- Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements, and design action plans around implementing those improvements.
- Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.
Qualifications
Education & Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
- 10+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations, experience with hyperscalers preferred.
- Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems, including experience establishing operational procedures or runbooks and bringing others up to speed on them.
Technical Skills
- Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
- Proven ability to leverage AI tools to improve platform stability and scalability.
- Knowledge of storage systems, performance, sharding and storage algorithms.
- Experience in load balancing services including IPVS.
- Security-minded operations (patching, hardening, identifying vulnerabilities).
- Familiarity with service reliability concepts — monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
- Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).
- Experience working with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts required; comfortable operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces).
- Experience with Hashicorp products (Nomad, Vault, Terraform).
Preferred Attributes
- Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
- Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA’s.
- Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Backblaze Perks
- Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
- Competitive compensation and 401K
- RSU grants for full-time employees
- ESPP program
- Flexible vacation policy
- Maternity & paternity leave
- MacBook Pro to use for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation
- Childcare bonus (human children only)
- Fertility treatment and support
- Learning & development program
- Commuter benefits
- Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance
Pay Transparency
To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.
The pay range for this position is $215,000 to $250,000 per year.
At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.
To understand more about the data we collect and process as part of your application, please view our Backblaze Employee Privacy Notice.
See All 8 Remote Principal SRE Jobs
Find roles that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Remote Principal SRE JobsRemote Principal SRE Job Market
Who's Hiring
Top Industries Hiring
- Manufacturing
- Medical Devices
What Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in remote principal SRE jobs.
- 7 or more years of combined software engineering and site reliability engineering experience
- Deep expertise with at least one major cloud platform such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Proficiency in Kubernetes, container orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code tooling like Terraform
- Experience defining and owning SLOs, SLAs, and error budget policies across production services
- Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or Java for automation and tooling development
- Demonstrated leadership in incident command, blameless postmortems, and cross-team reliability programs
Tips for Your Remote Principal SRE Job Search
Apply early to remote roles that fit
Migrate Mate lists remote principal sre openings from across the U.S. in one place, so you can find roles that match your stack and seniority level and apply directly without sorting through unrelated postings.
Show async leadership in your portfolio
Remote employers evaluating principal sres want proof you can lead without a whiteboard. Publish a detailed incident retrospective, an SLO design doc, or a runbook you've authored. Written artifacts demonstrate both your technical depth and your ability to drive alignment asynchronously.
Highlight distributed on-call ownership clearly
Remote principal sre hiring managers look for candidates who have owned on-call rotations across time zones, not just participated in them. Call out the systems you were responsible for, the error budget decisions you made, and how you coordinated with distributed teammates during incidents.
Prepare for remote system design interviews
Remote principal sre interviews frequently use shared diagramming tools like Miro or Excalidraw instead of physical whiteboards. Practice narrating your design decisions out loud while drawing, since interviewers judge your reasoning process as much as the final architecture in a remote session.
Remote Principal SRE Jobs: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a remote principal sre job?
Remote principal sre roles go to candidates who can demonstrate deep reliability engineering expertise and the ability to drive architectural decisions without in-person oversight. Remote employers screen heavily for strong written communication, comfort with async collaboration tools like Slack and Jira, and a history of leading cross-functional initiatives independently. A portfolio of incident retrospectives, runbooks, or public SLO frameworks you've authored signals both the technical depth and the self-direction remote teams need.
Which companies hire remote principal sres?
Remote principal sre roles are posted by Backblaze, BAE Systems USA, and Collins Aerospace and others right now, based on current remote listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. These tend to be remote-first software companies, fintech platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure teams that rely on distributed SRE practices to maintain large-scale production systems.
Can you get a remote principal sre job with no experience?
Yes, but remote principal sre roles are among the harder remote positions to land without direct experience, since you're expected to operate independently at a senior architectural level from day one. Your clearest path is contributing to open-source SRE tooling, publishing detailed post-mortems or reliability write-ups, and building a visible record of on-call ownership on smaller distributed systems before targeting principal-level remote openings.
Do you need a degree for remote principal sre jobs?
Not always. Remote employers hiring principal sres weight demonstrated systems expertise, production reliability outcomes, and architectural judgment far more heavily than a formal degree. Certifications in cloud platforms, a strong history of owning SLOs and error budgets, and evidence of cross-team technical leadership can carry a candidate past the degree requirement at most remote-first companies.
Which industries hire the most remote principal sres?
Remote principal sre roles concentrate in Manufacturing and Medical Devices, based on current remote listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. These sectors rely on globally distributed engineering teams that need principal-level SRE leadership to maintain high-availability systems without centralizing staff in a single office.
See All 8 Remote Principal SRE Jobs
Find roles that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Remote Principal SRE Jobs