Staff Engineer, Site Reliability

The posting, as Babylist wrote it

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 deb

[…]
r career advancement

• We believe technology and data can solve hard problems
• We're committed to career progression and performance-based advancement

Benefits

• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Retirement savings plan with company matching and flexible spending accounts
• Generous paid parental leave and PTO
• Winter Wonder Week: the whole company takes a paid week off at the end of the year, whether or not you celebrate anything, so everyone's out at once and comes back refreshed
• Remote work stipend to set up your office
• Perks for physical, mental, and emotional health, parenting, childcare, and financial planning

Important Notices

Recorded Interviews. Babylist uses an interview recording tool to record and transcribe interviews for evaluation purposes in accordance with applicable privacy laws. By participating in an interview, you consent to this recording and transcription.

Interview Integrity. AI is part of how we work at Babylist. We expect you to use it too. Your application and interviews should still reflect you and your own thinking. We'll tell you when AI is encouraged. Misrepresentation at any stage may result in removal from consideration for this and future roles.

How We Review Applications We use AI throughout our hiring process to help review, screen, and assess applications. These tools support our team's review; they do not replace it, and every hiring decision is made by a person.

Connections at Babylist. If you have a family member or close personal relationship with a current Babylist employee, please let your recruiter know. This helps us keep our process fair and transparent for everyone.

Protect Yourself from Scams. All official outreach comes from the Babylist Talent Team via @babylist.com email addresses only. We will never ask for payment or personal financial information. If you receive outreach via WhatsApp, Telegram, or a non-Babylist email, it's not us. Verify open roles at babylist.com/careers.