Software Engineer, Reliability

Metropolis is an artificial intelligence company that uses computer vision technology to enable frictionless, checkout‑free experiences in the real world. We are reimagining parking to enable millions of consumers to just “drive in and drive out.” Our vision is to allow people to transact with speed, ease, and convenience unmatched online, and to power checkout‑free experiences everywhere. The goal is to return time to people and make everyday experiences of living, working and playing remarkable.

We are building a hyperscaler company and need someone to own reliability across the entire Metropolis platform. As a Staff or Senior Software Engineer focused on Reliability, you’ll establish and drive comprehensive reliability practices that ensure system availability, resilience, and observability for our mission‑critical mobility infrastructure serving millions of transactions. This is your opportunity to build reliability from first principles: architect fail‑over systems, implement chaos‑engineering practices, and improve the observability foundation that will enable scaling while maintaining 99.9%+ uptime.

You’ll be the technical owner of our reliability posture, working on everything from multi‑region fail‑over architectures to incident‑response workflows to SLO‑based alerting strategies.

Our platform handles real‑time payment processing, customer authentication, and parking facility operations – systems that cannot go down. You’ll tackle challenges such as external service fail‑over, dependency mirroring to prevent upstream outages, database replication, automatic promotion, and building monitoring and alerting infrastructure that detects and responds to issues in minutes, not hours.

If you're energized by the challenge of ensuring system reliability at scale, building robust fail‑over mechanisms, implementing comprehensive observability, and establishing practices that prevent incidents before they occur, this role is for you. You'll work alongside highly technical teams, influencing architecture decisions and setting reliability standards that affect every service we build.

• Own the overall reliability posture for the Metropolis platform, establishing practices, metrics, and systems that ensure 99.9%+ uptime across all services
• Design and implement automatic fail‑over mechanisms for critical external dependencies with circuit breakers, retry policies, and degraded‑mode operations
• Architect and build active‑passive or active‑active regional deployment strategies with database replication, automated fail‑over, and DNS‑based traffic routing including disaster‑recovery planning and testing
• Establish comprehensive monitoring using Datadog for APM, logs, and metrics correlation; implement synthetic monitoring, SLO‑based alerting, on‑call rotation, escalation policies, and build service‑health dashboards that show customer impact
• Own the incident‑management process including workflows, tooling, post‑mortem culture, runbook automation, and MTTR reduction initiatives – driving down mean time to recovery from detection to resolution
• Drive adoption of resilience patterns across all services including health checks, graceful degradation, feature flags, rate limiting, back pressure mechanisms, and chaos‑engineering practices
• Build and maintain local mirrors for critical dependencies with artifact caching, dependency pinning, and vulnerability scanning to prevent build failures from upstream outages

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with a deep focus on distributed systems and platform infrastructure
• Expert‑level Java proficiency with deep understanding of JVM performance, concurrency, and ecosystem tooling;
  Scala experience is a big plus
• Production experience with microservices architecture, container orchestration (Kubernetes), and cloud platforms (AWS)
• Strong systems thinking with proven ability to design and implement large‑scale, high‑availability distributed systems that handle significant load
• Observability expertise with hands‑on production experience with metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting systems in high‑load environments
• Database and…