Staff Engineer, Site Reliability

How We Build

Babylist is in the middle of a fundamental shift in how software gets made, and we are not tiptoeing into it. We are rebuilding our engineering culture around a simple belief: AI changes everything. How teams are structured, how decisions get made, how fast ideas become working software. Our engineers own problems end to end, working directly with product, design, and business partners with short feedback loops and real stakeholder access. We ship, learn, and iterate fast. When something is not working, we throw it out and start over — project failure and personal failure are not the same thing here. AI tools are as natural to our workflow as an IDE or version control. We are not exploring this, we are living it. Our engineers use AI to explore tradeoffs, pressure-test designs, and move from problem to solution in hours instead of days. They generate code with AI so they can stay focused on the decisions that actually require human judgment — not the routine ones. More velocity means more time for craft: better test coverage, stronger architecture, and deeper customer understanding. We hold ourselves to a higher quality bar because of AI, not in spite of it. We are building this playbook in real time, and we are looking for people who want to build it with us. If you have already changed how you work because of AI — or you are ready to — and you care more about shipping something great than following a prescribed process, we should talk.

Our Tech Stack

• Ruby on Rails

• AWS

• Sidekiq

• MySQL

• Redis

What the Role Is

Babylist's Platform team is the foundation every engineering team builds on — and this role is at the center of keeping it reliable, fast, scalable, and secure. As a Staff SRE, you'll own the infrastructure and reliability practices that support 9 million+ users and the engineers who build for them. You'll bring strong software engineering skills and experience building security into production systems, turning that experience into code, automation, and secure defaults. You'll evolve our AWS infrastructure, CI systems, and developer tooling as Babylist grows across e-commerce, registry, health, media, and mobile. You'll share the team's core SRE responsibilities and bring particular depth in security engineering, leading security improvements alongside reliability, developer experience, and platform initiatives.

Who You Are

• Strong software engineering skills — you've shipped and operated production-quality tools or services, with tests, code review, and maintainable interfaces

• Experience building security into production systems — you've personally designed, implemented, and operated controls for access, workload identity, secrets, or network isolation

• Deep hands-on Terraform expertise — you own IaC, not just contribute to it

• Proven AWS experience at scale — EKS, RDS, cloud networking, DNS, CDNs, load balancers — you know the gotchas

• Experienced operating Kubernetes in production — you've debugged the hard stuff, not just deployed the easy stuff

• Comfortable designing and improving CI/CD systems — CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or similar; you care about developer velocity, not just pipeline uptime

• Strong observability instincts — Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty, Cronitor — you build alerting that's actionable, not noisy

• Experienced with on-call and incident management — you've run the post-mortems and actually changed things afterward

• Comfortable supporting developers across local, staging, and production — you're a resource, not a gatekeeper

• You naturally reach for AI in your work — at Babylist, every team uses AI daily. You're already using it to move faster and improve your output, and you stay curious about what's coming next.

How You Will Make An Impact

• Infrastructure ownership — manage and evolve our AWS environment using Terraform, keeping EKS clusters, databases, and core services current, performant, and secure

• Software and automation — ship tested tools and services with runbooks and self-service workflows that other engineers can adopt and operate

• Secure infrastructure defaults — build versioned, tested Terraform modules for least-privilege access, secrets, and workload isolation, with automated checks for configuration drift

• CI/CD reliability — keep delivery fast and dependable across Engineering, integrating dependency and container scanning, secret detection, and short-lived deployment credentials

• Developer support — be the person engineers turn to when environments break; unblock them fast across local, staging, and production

• Monitoring & alerting standards — define service-level objectives (SLOs) and actionable alerting with engineering teams, using incident trends to prioritize reliability improvements

• Recovery readiness — validate backups, restore procedures, and failover paths through regular recovery tests

• Incident response — lead or support incident response, drive post-incident reviews, and close the loop…