Site Reliability Engineer lll

At Absence Soft, we’re transforming the employee experience. Our secure, intuitive technology helps employers bring humanity, certainty, and efficiency to some of the most complex moments in the workplace. Built by HR professionals for HR professionals, we’re proud of where we’ve been and even more excited about where we’re going.

We’re looking for a senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our small, high-ownership SRE team. In this hands-on individual contributor role, you'll own the reliability, scalability, and security of Absence Soft's production infrastructure on AWS — supporting a B2B SaaS platform that processes sensitive employee leave data for enterprise customers. You'll work closely with infrastructure, application engineering, product leadership, and cross-functional partners in Security and Compliance, with a clear path to grow toward a Tech Lead opportunity as our team and platform continue to mature.

• Architect, implement, and operate scalable, resilient, and secure AWS infrastructure — including Guard Duty, Lambda, Event Bridge, SNS, SES, S3, ALB, and ECS container workloads.
• Lead infrastructure-as-code initiatives to ensure all environments are reproducible, auditable, and consistently configured in support of SOC 2 change management controls.
• Design, maintain, and improve CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and Git Hub to enable reliable, repeatable software delivery — partnering with application engineering to reduce release risk and increase deployment frequency.
• Own the Datadog observability platform, including dashboards, monitors, alerting thresholds, and log management; define and maintain SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to guide reliability investment and reduce alert fatigue.
• Serve as a senior technical responder across the full incident lifecycle — detection, containment, resolution, and postmortem — within a shared on-call rotation, and lead blameless postmortems to drive down incident frequency and MTTR.
• Refine, implement, and test disaster recovery plans to meet RTO/RPO objectives, while contributing to SOC 2 audit readiness with a focus on access controls, incident response, and risk mitigation.
• Mentor junior SREs through code reviews, incident pairing, and documentation of runbooks and engineering standards.

• 5+ years of experience in SRE, Dev Ops, or a related engineering role, with advanced hands-on expertise in AWS production environments and core services including Lambda, ECS, S3, ALB, and Guard Duty.
• Strong proficiency in infrastructure-as-code tooling such as Terraform, Cloud Formation, or CDK, paired with experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and Git Hub.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash for automation, alongside hands-on experience with Datadog or a comparable observability platform for monitoring, alerting, and log management.
• Demonstrated experience leading incident response in complex, distributed systems, with working knowledge of SLO/SLI frameworks, error budgets, and disaster recovery planning against defined RTO/RPO objectives.
• Familiarity with SOC 2 compliance frameworks and experience contributing to audit readiness, access controls, and security control evidence collection.
• A collaborative, ownership-driven mindset with strong communication skills, a passion for mentoring junior engineers, and a commitment to reducing toil through automation and AI-assisted tooling.

At Absence Soft, we LEAD with our values:

Lead with Innovation - We create meaningful change through intelligence, focus and passion. We embrace curiosity, data, and insight to shape the future of our industry. Always innovating, learning and evolving.

Elevate Every Voice - Every perspective matters. We listen, learn, and build a culture where diversity of thought and experience drives better solutions and smarter decisions.

Achieve Together - The customer fuels everything we do. We share knowledge, collaborate, celebrate wins, and face challenges as one team because success is always a collective achievement.

Drive Outcome - Every action we take delivers measurable value to our teams, our customers, and the employees they support.…