Staff Engineer, SRE

About Betterment

Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission: making people’s lives better. We’re headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (three days/ week in-office).

About the role

Site Reliability is a trusted partner throughout the organization, constantly working to keep everything running smoothly. We do this by building tools for our development teams, improving reliability and performance of our systems, and enabling monitoring and visibility into our services. This helps us move faster and smarter within a highly regulated and secure environment. We leverage a number of technologies to power our tools and platform, including AWS, Docker, Kubernetes (EKS), Helm, Terraform, Datadog, CircleCI, and write our code in Ruby on Rails, Go, and Bash, just to name a few. As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer you'll help deliver new tools and systems that make engineering more impactful as well as maintain and improve current systems alongside a team of amazing engineers.

This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we've reflected the base salary range we would offer for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees. 

• New York City: $210,000 - $240,000

We offer a competitive equity package, health, dental and vision benefits, life and AD&D, short-term and long-term disability insurance, EAP, commuter and parking benefits FSA/HSA, and 401(k) with employer match as well as a flexible PTO policy. This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.

A day in the life

• Improve our software delivery pipeline in a way that makes it expedient and encourages a culture of high code quality
• Work with business units to scale and design systems that are highly available and resilient
• Make substantial code contributions to our applications and configuration management software
• Weigh in on design documents and perform code reviews, providing valuable and actionable feedback to peers throughout engineering
• Participate in on call cycles
• Collaborate, with purpose. You’ll work in small groups with other talented thinkers and figure out how to make Betterment’s revolutionary software even better
• Teach and Learn. As a Staff Engineer, we expect you to share your knowledge with new, junior, and senior engineers. Help mentor and grow our team professionally as well as learn from our leaders to level up your own talents

What we’re looking for

• Expertise in software development toolchains and environments, CI/CD pipelines, SLIs/SLOs, and Observability
• A depth of experience building reliable, scalable, and secure cloud native solutions that enable development teams to operate independently - we use AWS
• Experience with automation, infrastructure as code, and configuration management
• Experience with container-based applications
• A demonstrated understanding of software development best practices
• Passion for software engineering as a craft, and for creating what doesn’t yet exist
• Ability to make the tradeoffs required to ship without compromising quality
• Appreciation for agility and pragmatism in software development
• A bias for action and proactive problem-solving

What being at Betterment means for you

We change lives

Join a community of innovators working to transform financial outcomes for real people. Your work will make an impact, always laddering up to our mission: making people's lives better.

We set audacious goals

We set them for the company, our customers, and ourselves—and we won’t stop until we reach them. We don’t just show up; we give our all, then celebrate our wins.

We value all perspectives

When we collaborate, we're at our best. We believe diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes and strive to uphold our supportive and inclusive community.

 We invest in you with:

• A competitive suite of benefits, including: medical, dental, and vision insurance; life and AD&D insurance; STD and LTD benefits, including infertility support and World Professional Association for Transgender Health approved benefits; and generous parental leave. 
• Flexible paid time off (and encouragement to use it!)
• Meaningful opportunity for community building through our 7 Employee Resource Groups
• Empowerment to own and lead change and affect the business
• Dedicated professional development opportunities
• Lunch from our in-house chef three days a week at our NYC headquarters

What happens next

We’ll take a few weeks to review all applications. If we’d like to spend more time with you, we’ll reach out to arrange next steps, which will include 3-4 sets of meetings with your future colleagues.

In the interview process, we’ll look to learn more about your skills, experiences, capabilities, and motivators. Many of our questions will be aimed at understanding how you might operate here at Betterment. Depending on the role, we may ask you to complete a case study exercise or technical assessments, as we want to collect a robust set of data points to better inform our decisions.

On average, it takes us around 3-5 weeks to make a hiring decision, depending on your availability and sense of urgency. As a best practice, we aim to interview at least 2-3 final round candidates before making a hiring decision. Please note that, as we usually receive an overwhelming number of  applications for open positions, we’re unable to offer individual feedback during the interview process. 

We recognize that interviewing for a new role is a big deal. We appreciate you considering Betterment as the next step in your career, and our Recruiting Team is here to support and advocate for you through the interview process!

Betterment is dedicated to providing accommodations to candidates upon request. If you need accommodations at any point throughout the interview process, please reach out to your recruiter. 

Please note that in any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.

Come join us! 

We’re an equal opportunity employer and comply with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practices laws. We strictly prohibit and do not tolerate discrimination against employees, applicants, or any other covered persons because of race, color, religion, creed, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, sex, gender (including gender nonconformity and status as a transgender or transsexual individual), sexual orientation, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, citizenship, past, current or prospective service in the uniformed services, predisposing genetic characteristic, domestic violence victim status, arrest records, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state or local law.