Principal Software Engineer, Site Reliability

About Upstart

At Upstart, we’re united by a mission that matters: to radically reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing for all Americans. Every day, we bring creativity, experimentation, and advanced AI to reshape access to credit, helping millions move forward financially with clarity and confidence.

As the leading AI lending marketplace, we partner with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through technology that’s both radically intelligent and deeply human. Our platform runs over one million predictions per borrower using more than 1,800 signals, powering smarter, fairer decisions for millions of customers. But the numbers only hint at the impact. Every idea, every voice, and every contribution moves us closer to a world where credit never stands between people and their financial progress.

We’re proudly digital-first, giving most Upstarters the flexibility to do their best work from wherever they thrive, alongside teammates across 80+ cities in the US and Canada. Digital-first doesn’t mean distant. We’re intentional about in-person connection through team onsites, planning sessions, and moments that spark creativity and trust. And whether you choose to work primarily from home or collaborate in-person from one of our offices in Columbus, Austin, the Bay Area, or New York City (opening Summer 2026), you’ll have the support to work in the way that works best for you.

If you’re energized by tackling meaningful problems, excited to innovate with purpose, and motivated by work that truly matters, we’d love to hear from you.

The Team:

Upstart’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team owns the reliability, resiliency, and observability of Upstart’s production systems. We build automation, tooling, and frameworks to ensure our infrastructure is healthy, scalable, and able to support a seamless experience for both engineers and customers. Our scope includes defining Upstart’s technology operations risk strategy, implementing disaster recovery planning, and setting company-wide reliability standards.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the SRE team at Upstart, you will serve as a thought leader and SRE evangelist - driving adoption of best practices, mentoring engineers across the organization, and influencing both technical and business decisions. Your impact will extend beyond SRE into cross-functional collaboration with Product Engineering, Dev Ex, Development Productivity (Quality), Dev Ops, Data Engineering, and Machine Learning teams to elevate operational excellence across the company.

How you’ll make an impact

• Lead the definition, advocacy, and adoption of SRE principles across engineering teams
• Partner with leadership to shape long-term reliability, resiliency, and observability strategies
• Champion distributed tracing, real user monitoring (RUM), and key performance metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) to improve system visibility and user experience
• Build and scale self‑healing systems to minimize manual intervention and reduce downtime
• Drive enterprise‑wide improvements to incident response processes, including those related to Machine Learning systems
• Collaborate closely with Development Productivity and Quality teams to improve engineering velocity without sacrificing reliability
• Influence technical and operational roadmaps through data‑driven insights and hands‑on technical contributions
• Own and deliver cross‑functional initiatives from concept through execution, applying program management skills to align stakeholders and achieve results

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years combined experience across Software Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering, with a balanced background in both disciplines
• Proven track record as an SRE thought leader and evangelist, driving adoption of reliability best practices across organizations
• Strong communication and mentoring skills to influence engineers across disciplines
• Proficiency in Python, Go, and JavaScript/Type Script
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK, Cloud Formation, etc.)
• Experience building internal tooling from scratch in agile development environments
• Expertise with observability, distributed…