Reliability Engineer

Join to apply for the Automated QA Engineer role at Phonely (YC S24).

Base pay range

$/yr - $/yr

About This Role

At some point in the future, every business will answer their phone with voice AI. We are making sure that when they build that AI agent, the experience of doing so doesn’t suck. We’re growing incredibly fast and need someone who thrives in a dynamic, high‑pressure environment to work side‑by‑side with our engineering and leadership team. To win in the AI space, we need to ship incredibly fast.

When you’re dealing with LLM systems, realtime voice infrastructure pipelines and telephony there are so many things that can go wrong. Your job is to write tests, monitoring, and evaluating the health of our platform. You’ll be tasked with everything from figuring out how to set up monitoring telephony infrastructure to building analytics on latency and other core systems. This may be one of the most important roles in the company and is critical in helping us move faster, stay organized, and execute at the highest level.

We’re looking for someone who is highly organized, driven, and fun to work with. You’ll be working directly with our engineers, customers, and product team.

NOTE:

You will be thinking of problems for the first time, writing a lot of code, and you’ll be directly responsible for keeping our platform online.

What You Will Do

• Design, write, and maintain automated tests across APIs, services, and telephony infrastructure

• Build and manage monitoring, alerting, and health checks for production systems

• Manage incidents, uptime metrics and reliability dashboards

• Investigate failures and production incidents

• Work with engineers to reproduce issues and prevent regressions

• Work through our QA processes for releases, rollouts, and hotfixes

• Continuously improve test coverage and signal quality

What We Are Looking For

• 2-3 years of experience in backend SWE, QA engineer or SDET with a strong testing focus

• 1+ year experience using Datadog

• Strong experience writing automated tests (API, integration, end to end)

• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (logs, metrics, alerts)

• Comfort working with CI/CD pipelines

• Ability to think in terms of failure modes and edge cases, and prioritize accordingly

• Clear communicator who can work cross‑functionally

Nice to have

• Experience with high availability or real time systems

• Experience testing distributed systems or production APIs

• Experience with LLM and eval platforms

• Background in uptime, reliability, or site reliability engineering

• Experience in fast moving startup environments/ former founders

• Former athlete/ competitor in some fashion

Why Join Phonely?

We’re super cool. Our team is a group of ex-athletes, founders, and builders with low egos, and a high belief that life is not about taking the easy road, but challenging ourselves to find the most we can be. Working at Phonely feels like family; we eat most meals together as a team (the company pays for food), we go on runs, hikes and surf together when we’re not working.

We also rent out Airbnb’s in cool places (Rocky mountains, Costa Rica, Indonesia) four times a year so you can still see the world while on the grind. From a product and direction standpoint, we are customer‑obsessed and focused on building a product that we ourselves would love to use. We are solving voice AI problems that have never been solved before with a mission to build something that 1M+ businesses love.

Working at Phonely, you’ll have the flexibility to contribute to all aspects of the business. It will be hard, but it will be rewarding. We are extremely picky with who we bring on as full‑time employees.

If you made it to this part of the JD, please message me (Will) with an item from your bucket list and something impressive you’ve done.

About The Interview

• a 10 minute chat with me the CEO!

• a more in depth interview

• if possible a working trial of 2‑7 days

Seniority level

Mid‑Senior level

Employment type

Full‑time

Job function

Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

Administrative and Support Services

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We look forward to you applying!

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