Staff Software Engineer - Reliability (US Citizen OR Green Card Only)
Company websiterubrik.com (Rubrik, opens in new tab)
Base salary $218,300 to $327,500
Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Palo Alto, CA
You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.
- LocationPalo Alto, CA
- WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
- Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
- Last checked (29 min ago) · observed since
About this job
About Team & About Role
The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at Rubrik ensures the absolute reliability, availability, performance, and security of our enterprise infrastructure services, spanning both global SaaS platforms and government-compliant environments. We operate at the intersection of software development and systems engineering, prioritizing hyperscale platform automation, self-healing architectures, and structural resiliency. As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you will serve as a primary technical leader and architect across our broader distributed cloud systems. You will drive long-term technical roadmaps, establish cross-organizational reliability standards, and solve complex distributed systems challenges that safeguard both enterprise and public sector environments.
Beyond the core SRE charter, this Staff role also leads the Application-SRE team — a US-based group that partners closely with engineering, Sales, and Support to unblock POCs, drive complex customer escalations to resolution, and convert recurring field signals into engineering and reliability roadmap items. You will be the technical leader and project owner for Application-SRE: setting direction, tracking commitments, and ensuring the team operates as a high-leverage bridge between the field and the broader engineering org.
What You'll Do
As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you will possess engineering-wide influence and take ownership of the following critical areas:
- Infrastructure Strategy & Architecture: Formulate and execute the architectural vision for Rubrik's Cloud Platform, optimizing backend infrastructure systems like Kubernetes, MySQL, and cloud-native services for performance, security, and multi-region scale.
- Hyperscale Automation & Platform Tooling: Build, scale, and maintain sophisticated custom internal tools, platform controllers, and automation frameworks in Go or Python to systematically eliminate operational toil.
- AI Infrastructure for SaaS: Deploy, scale, and operate the AI infrastructure that powers Rubrik's SaaS offerings, owning the reliability, performance, cost, and security controls required to run AI workloads in multi-tenant, compliance-bound environments.
- AI for SRE & Engineering Productivity: Drive the adoption of AI-driven solutions across the SRE charter to compress toil and multiply the org - applying agentic and LLM-based approaches to automated triage, incident response, operational analysis, and developer productivity.
- AI Adoption Guardrails for SaaS Reliability: Build the guardrails, controls, and platform patterns that keep Rubrik's SaaS reliable as AI adoption accelerates across product and engineering, ensuring new AI capabilities ship without eroding availability, performance, security, or cost posture.
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Wield engineering-wide influence to create technical consensus among component, platform, and security engineering teams, effectively "shifting left" to embed structural resilience, capacity guards, and compliance from initial feature designs.
- Reliability Governance: Define, audit, and enforce robust Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budgets across all critical enterprise platform services, translating telemetry insights into actionable product roadmaps during executive reviews.
- Incident Command & Operations Review: Serve as a primary Incident Commander for high-severity cloud outages, establishing roles, directing mitigation vectors under pressure, and orchestrating comprehensive, blameless post-mortems that drive durable systemic fixes.
- Cost Governance & Capacity Modeling: Architect cost-observability tools and attribution frameworks, leading cloud infrastructure capacity forecasting, resource quota optimization, and vendor SLA management.
- Application-SRE Leadership: Set the technical direction for the Application-SRE team, raising the bar on how the team diagnoses, mitigates, and durably resolves the most complex customer-impacting issues across our platform.
- Technical Multiplier & Mentorship: Champion SRE best practices, mentoring senior and junior individual contributors across the organization, participating in interview frameworks, and actively raising the collective technical bar.
- On-Call Rotations: Participate in on-call rotations
Experience You'll Need
- Citizenship & Residency: Must be a US Citizen currently residing on CONUS soil (strict regulatory requirement to enable support for federal and FedRAMP environments when required).
- Education: BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a highly related technical discipline.
- Industry Experience: A minimum of 8–12+ years of software engineering and production cloud infrastructure experience, with at least 5+ years dedicated to a formal SRE, DevOps, or Platform engineering role operating hyperscale SaaS products.
- Technical Depth: Comprehensive, hands-on programming expertise in Golang, Python, or Java with a deep grasp of concurrency models, data structures, and test-driven software design patterns.
- Distributed Systems Expertise: Proven proficiency designing, deploying, analyzing, and auditing complex, large-scale distributed systems, database topologies, and high-availability public cloud meshes.
- Systems Internals: Authoritative operational command of Unix/Linux operating system environments (process models, file systems, kernels), systems administration, and advanced L4/L7 networking protocols.
- AI Systems Fluency: Working knowledge of operating AI systems in production — including model serving, cost trade-offs, and the reliability and safety considerations of LLM- and agent-based workloads. Practical judgment on when AI is the right tool versus deterministic automation.
- Field-to-Product Feedback Loop: Institutionalize the channel that converts patterns from customer escalations and POCs into prioritized product and reliability feedback, partnering directly with Product, Sales Engineering and Support leadership.
- Customer & Field Fluency: Track record of partnering directly with Sales, Support, and customers on escalations and POCs, and translating field signals into engineering action.
- Leadership Capability: Demonstrated history of technical leadership, mapping architectural dependencies, managing multi-team technical projects, and guiding organizations through critical platform shifts with high technical judgment.
Preferred Qualifications
- Extensive production experience provisioning, lifecycle-managing, and recovering enterprise-scale Kubernetes (GKE, EKS) deployments and large-scale relational/non-relational databases (MySQL).
- Prior experience building, certifying, or auditing infrastructure environments under compliance structures such as FedRAMP (High/Moderate), SOC 2, ISO 27001, or CJIS.
- Fluency in Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Pulumi) module design, multi-tenant state isolation, and enterprise observability fabrics (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
- Exposure to building AI- or LLM-powered internal tooling and applying it to SRE, operations, or engineering productivity use cases.
- Familiarity with the operational considerations of running AI workloads on cloud and Kubernetes platforms.
The minimum and maximum base salaries for this role are posted below; additionally, the role is eligible for bonus potential, equity and benefits. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the role based on U.S. location. Within the range, the salary offered will be determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
US Pay Range
$218,300—$327,500 USD
Join Us in Securing and Accelerating the World's AI Transformation
Rubrik (NYSE: RBRK) is the Security and AI Operations Company, delivering one platform built at the intersection of data, identity, and AI. The platform enables agentic cyber resilience and trusted AI operations for enterprises worldwide, built to recover before disruption strikes and stay a step ahead, so security is never the reason ambition stalls.
Linkedin | X (formerly Twitter) | Instagram | Rubrik.com
Inclusion @ Rubrik
At Rubrik, we are dedicated to fostering a culture where people from all backgrounds are valued, feel they belong, and believe they can succeed. Our commitment to inclusion is at the heart of our mission to secure the world’s data.
Our goal is to hire and promote the best talent, regardless of background. We continually review our hiring practices to ensure fairness and strive to create an environment where every employee has equal access to opportunities for growth and excellence. We believe in empowering everyone to bring their authentic selves to work and achieve their fullest potential.
Our inclusion strategy focuses on three core areas of our business and culture:
-
Our Company: We are committed to building a merit-based organization that offers equal access to growth and success for all employees globally. Your potential is limitless here.
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Our Culture: We strive to create an inclusive atmosphere where individuals from all backgrounds feel a strong sense of belonging, can thrive, and do their best work. Your contributions help us innovate and break boundaries.
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Our Communities: We are dedicated to expanding our engagement with the communities we operate in, creating opportunities for underrepresented talent and driving greater innovation for our clients. Your impact extends beyond Rubrik, contributing to safer and stronger communities.
Equal Opportunity Employer/Veterans/Disabled
Rubrik is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. Rubrik provides equal employment opportunities to employees and applicants in all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, promotion, compensation, training, leave, and termination.
Rubrik provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees with disabilities in accordance with applicable law. If you need an accommodation to participate in the application process or to perform your job, please contact [email protected]. Accommodations may include changes to the application process, documents in an alternate format, a sign language interpreter, or specialized equipment.
EEO IS THE LAW
NOTIFICATION OF EMPLOYEE RIGHTS UNDER FEDERAL LABOR LAWS
Source: Rubrik on Greenhouse · View original posting (opens in new tab)
How this pay compares
Base floor $218,300, above 79% of the 5,073 Software Engineering roles in California on this site. The employer's range is $109,200 wide, 50% of the floor. Observed open for 7 days so far (since Nov 1, 2026).
Pay in context
Among 5,073 Software Engineering roles in California listed on this site, the median base floor is $176,800 and the middle half runs from $149,700 to $204,000. This role's floor ($218,300) is above 79% of them.
Base floors of 5,073 Software Engineering roles in California
Table
| Floor band | Share | Postings |
|---|---|---|
| $100K to $125K | 8.0% | 408 |
| $125K to $150K | 17.1% | 867 |
| $150K to $175K | 22.7% | 1,152 |
| $175K to $200K | 22.8% | 1,159 |
| $200K to $225K | 13.0% | 659 |
| $225K to $250K | 6.2% | 315 |
| $250K to $275K | 4.8% | 246 |
| $275K and up | 5.3% | 267 |
How this is calculated
- Statistic
- Base floor distribution of the cohort
- Formula
- count of cohort postings in each $25K band of published base floor / postings in the cohort
- Denominator
- 5,073 open postings with this job family in California
- Sample size
- 5073
- Hidden when
- needs at least 30 postings in the cohort
- Calculation version
- jobpage-analysis-v1
- Data as of
- 2026-11-08
- Employer set
- Open jobs on this site that publish a base salary of $100,000 or more
Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 8, 2026.
State against nationwide
Median base floor in California vs nationwide
Table
| Value | postings | |
|---|---|---|
| Software Engineering, California | $176,800 | 5,073 |
| Software Engineering, all states | $160K | 12,914 |
| This job's base floor (marked) | $218,300 |
How this is calculated
- Statistic
- Median floor, state vs nationwide
- Formula
- median published base floor of each cohort
- Denominator
- open postings of this job family
- Sample size
- 5073 in California; 12914 nationwide
- Hidden when
- needs at least 30 postings in both cohorts
- Calculation version
- jobpage-analysis-v1
- Data as of
- 2026-11-08
- Employer set
- Open jobs on this site that publish a base salary of $100,000 or more
How Rubrik pays
4 of Rubrik's 55 live roles on this site list a higher base floor and 50 list a lower one. Across them the median floor is $158,000; the middle half runs from $139,075 to $180,600.
Base floors of Rubrik's 55 live roles
Table
| Floor band | Share | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| $100K to $125K | 10.9% | 6 |
| $125K to $150K | 27.3% | 15 |
| $150K to $175K | 30.9% | 17 |
| $175K to $200K | 20.0% | 11 |
| $200K to $225K | 5.5% | 3 |
| $225K to $250K | 0.0% | 0 |
| $250K to $275K | 3.6% | 2 |
| $275K and up | 1.8% | 1 |
How this is calculated
- Statistic
- Employer base floor distribution
- Formula
- count of the employer's open roles in each $25K band of published base floor / its open roles
- Denominator
- 55 open public roles at this employer
- Sample size
- 55
- Hidden when
- needs at least 5 roles
- Calculation version
- jobpage-analysis-v1
- Data as of
- current
- Employer set
- Open jobs on this site that publish a base salary of $100,000 or more
Similar pay elsewhere
Other employers' Software Engineering roles in California with the nearest published base floor to $218,300, one per employer.
- Senior Director, Performance Engineering Salesforce · base floor $218,400
- Sr. Staff Systems Engineer Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies · base floor $218,200
- Senior Director, Software Engineering - Slack Application Architecture and Systems Slack · base floor $218,400
- Director, Product AI Platform Architect Applied Materials · base floor $218,500
- Staff Software Engineer, Information Systems Muon Space · base floor $218,000
This listingStaff Software Engineer - Reliability (US Citizen OR Green Card Only)$218,300 to $327,500
Director, Corporate Accounting$218,900 to $262,700
Global Solutions ArchitectFrom $208,100
Staff Product Manager, IT - GTM$193,400 to $290,200
Staff Product Manager, DatabasesFrom $190,200
Director, Product Design$250,300 to $350,800
Senior Machine Learning Engineer$188,500 to $282,700
Chart as a table
| Role | Published base |
|---|---|
| Staff Software Engineer - Reliability (US Citizen OR Green Card Only) (this listing) | $218,300 - $327,500 |
| Director, Corporate Accounting | $218,900 - $262,700 |
| Global Solutions Architect | From $208,100 |
| Staff Product Manager, IT - GTM | $193,400 - $290,200 |
| Staff Product Manager, Databases | From $190,200 |
| Director, Product Design | $250,300 - $350,800 |
| Senior Machine Learning Engineer | $188,500 - $282,700 |
Observed changes
No changes to the pay or listing since we first observed this role on Nov 1, 2026 (7 days ago).
- First observed on the employer's board
- Began meeting the published-salary criteria
- Observed since
- Employer-stated posting date
- 2026-05-29
Where this pay comes from
Location as the employer wrote it: Palo Alto, CA
USD 218,300 – 327,500 · interval unstated · pay_input_range · US Pay Range
- Method
- Structured pay field published by the employer
- Checked
- Rule set
- us-base-v2
The employer's job board publishes this pay as a dedicated data field. We read the field directly; no interpretation was needed.
What we verified
- The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
- The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
- The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.
We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.