Sr Software Engineer - Reliability Engineering

Company

Cox Automotive - USA

Engineering / Product Development

Sr Software Engineer

Individual ContributorHybrid - Ability to work remotely part of the week

Yes, 5% of the time

Day

Compensation

Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $121,800.00 - $203,000.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.

We're hiring a Sr. Software Engineer - Reliability Engineer who can code across the stack and cares deeply about reliability. You'll design and build infrastructure, observability tooling, and operational systems—treating resilience and debuggability as first-class concerns. You'll own projects end-to-end: from architecture → code → deployment → production. You'll split time between infrastructure-as-code, incident response, system improvements, and mentoring. You'll work on a team that ships quality systems while maintaining operational excellence across a platform serving millions of dealership transactions daily.

What You'll Do:

SRE Best Practices & System Health Management

• Design and implement resilience initiatives: redundancy, failover, disaster recovery, data protection.
• Write infrastructure-as-code (Terraform); manage 50+ AWS accounts with infrastructure patterns.
• Own system health: proactively maintain application performance, minimize downtime, ensure consistent user experience.
• Evolve team's SRE standards and practices.

Application Monitoring & Observability

• Build observability into systems: logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alert design.
• Improve monitoring frameworks; enable faster incident detection and resolution.
• Design dashboards and alerts that help teams understand system behavior.
• Partner with application teams on service instrumentation.

AWS Cost Optimization

• Drive significant reductions in cloud spend through architectural improvements and resource utilization.
• Review infrastructure for efficiency; identify and eliminate waste.
• Balance cost, performance, and reliability in design decisions.

Software Development & Architecture

• Build production systems, APIs, internal tools, and automation with clean, well-tested code.
• Design for maintainability, operational simplicity, and reliability.
• Participate in code review and technical design discussions.
• Mentor junior engineers on code quality and architectural thinking.

Operations & Incident Response

• Participate in on-call rotations; debug and resolve production incidents.
• Conduct postmortem analysis; drive systemic improvements.
• Develop operational procedures and runbooks.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years software engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Strong coding in Python, Go, Java, or equivalent; writes clean, testable code.
• AWS hands-on: EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, Aurora, Lambda, VPCs, Athena.
• Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Docker and container orchestration (Kubernetes or similar).
• Debugging on Linux and Windows platforms; able to troubleshoot complex systems using logs, metrics, and architectural knowledge.
• System design thinking: can architect scalable systems and reason about trade-offs.

• Availability for rotational on-call duties outside of standard business hours may be required.

• Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline and 4 years’ experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master’s degree and 2 years’ experience; a Ph.D. and up to 1 year of experience; or 16 years’ experience in a related field.

Highly Valued:

• Experience with observability tools (New Relic, Splunk, Prometheus).
• Incident response experience; familiar with postmortem practices.
• Interest in or hands-on experience with SRE concepts (SLOs, resilience, failure modes).
• Cost optimization mindset; has identified and eliminated cloud waste.
• Windows and Linux system troubleshooting and performance analysis.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.

To be employed in this role, you’ll need to clear a pre-employment drug test. Cox Automotive does not currently administer a pre-employment drug test for marijuana for this position. However, we are a drug-free workplace, so the possession, use or being under the influence of drugs illegal under federal or state law during work hours, on company property and/or in company vehicles is prohibited.

The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company’s needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.Through groundbreaking technology and a commitment to stellar experiences for drivers and dealers alike, Cox Automotive employees are transforming the way the world buys, owns, sells – or simply uses – cars. Cox Automotive employees get to work on iconic consumer brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book and industry-leading dealer-facing companies like vAuto and Manheim, all while enjoying the people-centered atmosphere that is central to our life at Cox. Benefits of working at Cox may include health care insurance (medical, dental, vision), retirement planning (401(k)), and paid days off (sick leave, parental leave, flexible vacation/wellness days, and/or PTO). For more details on what benefits you may be offered, visit our benefits page. Cox is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer – All qualified applicants/employees will receive consideration for employment without regard to that individual’s age, race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, ethnicity, citizenship, or any other characteristic protected by law. Cox provides reasonable accommodations when requested by a qualified applicant or employee with disability, unless such accommodations would cause an undue hardship.

EOE, including disability/vets