Stratus, deriving from the Latin term meaning 'layer', offers an advanced set of MEP specific solutions that seamlessly layer across a contractor's entire workflow from design to fabrication to installation. Our team of seasoned industry experts, skilled technology leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs understands that fabrication does not occur in isolation, and increasingly, it may not happen within your own fabrication shop. Through close relationships with our customers—who include some of the most innovative and largest MEP contractors—we have developed a suite of Stratus tools to digitize, automate, and optimize piping, plumbing, sheet metal, and electrical contracting. Stratus provides the software layer an MEP Contractor needs to optimize profits with true "Data Driven Contracting."

GENERAL DESCRIPTION:

The Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer is accountable for how Stratus behaves in production. Reporting to the Senior Director, Platform Engineering, this role brings genuine SRE discipline to a platform that MEP contractors run their fabrication shops on — where downtime does not mean a degraded experience, it means work stops on a job site. Stratus is a ~100-person, primarily remote, Series B software company growing quickly.

Unrelenting Reliability is one of our company values, and this is the role that operationalizes it. You will define what reliable means in numbers, instrument the system so we can see it, and close the loop from production signal back into engineering priority. This is an engineering role with a production mandate: you will write code, tune queries, build alerting, run load tests, and lead incidents — and you will be measured on customer-visible availability and latency, not on tickets closed.

The load-bearing problems on your plate are: (1) establishing service level objectives and an error budget the whole engineering organization operates against, with the measurement infrastructure to back them; (2) building the detection and response capability — high-signal alerting, clear on-call and escalation paths, per-system incident ownership, and well-exercised recovery paths — so that production problems are caught and resolved fast; and (3) building the performance and capacity engineering practice for our data and messaging layers, with headroom measured rather than assumed.

You will work across every engineering pod, with our platform and security functions, and with the customer-facing teams who see reliability problems first. The right candidate is comfortable being the person who says a number out loud and defends it, and is drawn to a place where the reliability practice is being built rather than maintained. Final level (Senior or Lead) will be determined by the depth and scope of experience demonstrated against the qualifications below, not years of experience alone.

*US Eastern time preferred

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Define and own service level indicators, objectives, and error budgets for customer-facing services; build the measurement pipeline that makes them trustworthy and publish availability and latency against target on a regular cadence.
Build and own production observability: instrumentation standards, dashboards, and actionable alerting on our stack — AKS on Azure, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, and Grafana, with Istio as the service mesh and Flux for GitOps — extending coverage across every environment.
Establish and run incident response practice — on-call rotation and paging paths, severity definitions, per-system incident ownership, escalation into and out of customer support, and blameless post-mortems in incident.io.
Set the recovery standard: define what rollback and recovery must demonstrate, and verify through regular exercise that every service meets it.
Lead performance and capacity engineering: query and index tuning, connection-pool sizing, capacity modeling against real load, and designing for graceful degradation under partial failure.
Work with the existing team that runs our k6 load, stress, spike, and soak testing against a production-like environment; help set per-endpoint latency thresholds tied to our SLOs and make the results a gate on delivery.
Drive production readiness: review new services and significant changes against readiness criteria covering instrumentation, alerting, failure modes, resource limits, and rollback before they ship.
Close the loop on remediation: track post-mortem action items through to verified production change.
Contribute to business continuity and disaster recovery planning, including backup and restore validation, failover design, and recovery objectives.
Partner with engineering pods to push reliability ownership outward — coach teams on instrumenting and operating their own services.
Write code: tooling, automation, instrumentation libraries, and fixes in the production codebase.

QUALIFICATIONS:

6-8+ years of professional engineering experience, with 3-5+ years in a dedicated SRE or production engineering role at a B2B SaaS company.
Demonstrated ownership of SLOs and error budgets in production — you have defined them, measured them, argued about them with product leadership, and changed engineering behavior with them.
Deep, practical observability skills with Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, and Grafana or comparable: you have instrumented real systems and built alerting that pages on customer impact rather than on CPU.
Hands-on incident command experience at meaningful severity, including building on-call and escalation practice from the ground up.
Strong database performance skills — query profiling, index design, connection pooling, and diagnosing saturation under load. MongoDB experience strongly preferred; comparable document or relational depth acceptable.
Production Kubernetes experience (AKS preferred) sufficient to debug a live problem — pod scheduling, resource limits, networking, and service mesh behavior (Istio preferred).
Solid coding ability in at least one general-purpose language (Go, Python, C#, or TypeScript); willingness to work in a C#/.NET codebase.
Experience with load and performance testing tooling (k6, JMeter, Gatling, or comparable) and with turning results into engineering priority.
Production experience on Azure or AWS, with real understanding of the failure modes of managed services.
Fluency with AI-assisted engineering tooling and a track record of designing AI-leveraged workflows for your team — this is a graded expectation at every level at Stratus.
Excellent written communication: you write post-mortems, runbooks, and reliability reports that executives and engineers both read and act on.
Judgment and steadiness under pressure, and the credibility to tell engineering and product leadership something they do not want to hear.

NICE TO HAVE:

Experience establishing or maturing an SRE practice — defining the discipline, not inheriting it.
Experience with Sentry or comparable application error-monitoring platforms.
Experience operating event-driven and real-time systems — message brokers (Azure Service Bus, Kafka) and websocket or push layers (SignalR or comparable).
Experience operating MongoDB Atlas at production scale, including replica set topology and Atlas performance tooling.
Experience with durable workflow orchestration (Temporal or comparable).
Background in multi-region or multi-zone architecture and DR design against stated recovery objectives.
Experience with incident.io, PagerDuty, or comparable incident management platforms.
Familiarity with DORA metrics and with reliability work inside SOC 2 or NIST 800-171 scope.
Experience with legacy monolith reliability — improving the operational behavior of an ASP.NET or comparable application you cannot rewrite.
Domain interest in MEP, BIM, AEC, or construction technology.
Prior experience in a Series B / growth-stage company navigating the transition from product-market fit to scale.

E-VERIFY STATEMENT
Stratusparticipatesin E-Verify. After you join the team,we'llverify your eligibility to work in the U.S. bysubmittinginformation from your Form I-9 to the Social Security Administration and, if needed, the Department of Homeland Security. This process happens post-hire only-we never use E-Verify to pre-screen applicants.
E-Verify Notice
Right to Work Notice

[]

About the company

Stratus provides cloud-based software for MEP contractors to manage projects, procurement, and expenses. Its platform connects VDC, shop, and field teams, enabling real-time data sharing and streamlined communication. It automates fabrication processes and can output directly to cutting equipment, while also offering mobile tools for field use. The revenue model is subscription-based, with additional revenue from custom reporting and API-integrations. Stratus aims to help MEP contractors improve workflow efficiency and increase profitability by integrating project management with fabrication automation and data-driven decision making.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Early VC

Total Funding

$7.5M

Headquarters

Larkspur, Colorado

Founded

2010

Get referred to Stratus

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

August 2026 data center report says 82% expect revenue growth from this work.
The May 2026 Page Interworks acquisition expands engineering reach and North Carolina presence.
The January 2025 $32 million Radian-backed Series B funds product depth and expansion.

What critics are saying

Autodesk and Trimble own upstream design workflows, squeezing Stratus integration leverage by 2027.
Stratus depends on fabrication-heavy contractors; any slow data center cycle weakens expansion.
AI spooling experiments in Stratus Labs risk disappointing buyers if outputs need manual cleanup.

What makes Stratus unique

Stratus unifies Revit, AutoCAD Plant 3D, shop, and field workflows in one system.
Its 2026 Labs pushes agentic spooling and MCP access before rivals.
The platform targets fabrication-heavy MEP contractors, not generic construction teams.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

Health Insurance
401(k) Company Match
Paid Vacation
Remote Work Options

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

1 year growth

2 year growth

Informa TechTarget

Oct 6th, 2026

Stratus releases new shop and field capabilities to help electrical contractors prefab more and rework less.

Stratus releases new shop and field capabilities to help electrical contractors prefab more and rework less. Crippa integration and Order Forms connect a model in the office, a form in the field, and a bend on the shop floor inside Stratus. Oct. 7, 2026 Press Contacts Hannah Arceri LARKSPUR, Colo. - Stratus, the MEP operating system trusted by contractors across electrical, piping & plumbing, and sheet metal trades, today announced two new capabilities tailored specifically for electrical workflows: * Order Forms, a new way to turn a field request into a tracked work order inside Stratus. * Crippa integration, bending machine sends data more efficiently to and from Stratus to keep work flowing with fewer touches. On the shop floor, a lot of the inefficiency electrical contractors deal with comes down to rework: data that already exists, in a model or on a filled-out form, still has to be manually pulled or re-entered before it becomes usable work in Stratus. Order Forms brings non-modeled work, including conduit bends, trapezes, and any other standardized catalog item, directly into Stratus for fabrication planning & tracking alongside model-based fab. The Crippa integration takes modeled bend data all the way to the machine, with no manual step in between. Together, they bring more of an electrical contractor's work into Stratus as structured, trackable data. Stratus customer, Houle Electric Limited, speaks to the value they are already seeing from their Crippa implementation, "The future of electrical prefabrication lies in connected digital workflows," said Curtis Ulriksen, Senior Manager of Manufacturing and Procurement at Houle. "When design data, fabrication planning, and automated production equipment operate within the same ecosystem, contractors can eliminate unnecessary manual steps, improve consistency, and deliver greater value to their projects." "Electrical contractors are rapidly increasing their fabrication footprint," said Jake Olsen, CEO of Stratus. "To optimize fabrication as part of their overall delivery method, they need one system that keeps up as work moves from design to the shop floor, through shipping and logistics, and ultimately out to field installation. Automated tools such as the Crippa conduit bender offer tremendous cost savings on their own, but they're most effective when connected directly to that system, so batching, planning, labeling, quality control and production data all feed back into the overall operating system. Together, these releases give the shop and field a more direct path to create and leverage that data throughout their business." The Crippa integration and Order Forms are now available to Stratus customers. Stratus recently showcased both during the NECA 2026 Convention & Trade Show, held Oct. 5-7 in Las Vegas, and remains proud to partner with NECA on ongoing industry events. To learn more or schedule a demo, visit www.stratus.build, or contact your Stratus account team. About Stratus Stratus is a software solution designed to empower contractors with tools that streamline prefabrication and construction workflows. By integrating with tools including Revit and AutoCAD, Stratus connects VDC, shop, and field teams with real-time production data and digital workflows. For more information, please visit www.stratus.build. About Crippa Founded in 1948 by Agostino Crippa, Crippa has spent nearly 80 years engineering tube bending and end-forming machinery, built on "Full Electric" technology for precision, repeatability, and reliability across industries including automotive, aerospace, HVACR, and industrial fabrication. Crippa is part of OCTA Group, alongside sister brands CMS and SMI. Learn more at www.octagroup.com/crippa. About Houle Houle is Western Canada's leading electrical contractor and systems integrator, empowering communities through projects that positively impact people's lives. Driven by purpose and connected through collaboration, our teams deliver innovative electrical and technology solutions for some of the most exciting and complex projects in the region. Learn more at www.houle.ca.

Informa TechTarget

Sep 15th, 2026

Stratus launches AutoCAD Plant 3D integration, bringing industrial piping fabrication onto the platform.

Stratus launches AutoCAD Plant 3D integration, bringing industrial piping fabrication onto the platform. Integration connects Plant 3D data to Stratus' packaging, tracking, shop workflow for industrial, oil & gas, chemical, power, food & beverage projects. Sept. 15, 2026 Press Contacts Hannah Arceri LARKSPUR, Colo. - Stratus, the digital fabrication platform trusted by contractors across piping & plumbing, sheet metal, and electrical trades, today announced the availability of its native AutoCAD Plant 3D integration, bringing industrial piping fabrication fully onto the Stratus platform. The integration closes a gap that has long slowed down industrial piping teams: design data from Plant 3D and PCF/isometric files typically require manual re-entry or re-modeling before fabrication teams could act on it. With this release, Plant 3D models publish directly into Stratus, carrying design intent through to a trackable spool on the shop floor without the rework in between. "Industrial piping customers kept telling us the same thing: the Plant3D model already has the fabrication data needed, but nobody downstream in the fab process could access it directly without either redrawing it or creating a bunch of PDFs," said Jake Olsen, CEO of Stratus. "This integration closes that gap. Model-based fabrication details are now available on the shop floor, in the same system contractors already use to run the rest of their fabrication." Key capabilities include: * Full 3D model visibility - Plant 3D models publish directly into Stratus' model viewer, giving fabrication teams a complete visual map of the piping system before a single spool is built. * Package visualization - Stratus automatically color-codes each spool by package line, showing fabrication teams instantly how the system breaks down into workable units. * Packages dashboard - Plant 3D data auto-generates spool packages in Stratus, complete with part counts, assembly counts, full parts list, cut lists, bend lists, and statuses ready for fabrication progress and install tracking. Buddy Legnon, Senior Sales Engineer at Stratus, works closely with contractors during development to shape the integration around real industrial workflows. "Why a Plant 3D integration? The easy answer: why model it if you don't intend to build it?" said Legnon. "Stratus takes your models and gives you an intelligent way to spool and package with real efficiency, fabricate the spools you've identified, and track every one of them all the way to installation. Stratus already does this across many Autodesk products - now, that includes Plant 3D." The AutoCAD Plant 3D integration is available now to Stratus customers. To learn more or schedule a demo, visit www.stratus.build, or contact your Stratus account team. Stratus is a software solution designed to empower contractors with tools that streamline prefabrication and construction workflows. By integrating with tools including Revit and AutoCAD, Stratus connects VDC, shop, and field teams with real-time production data and digital workflows. For more information, please visit www.stratus.build.

Informa TechTarget

Aug 28th, 2026

New Stratus report finds Data Center work is reshaping competitive advantage among MEP contractors.

New Stratus report finds Data Center work is reshaping competitive advantage among MEP contractors. Survey of fabrication-heavy MEP contractors shows where firms invest as data center demand accelerates, alongside new Stratus platform capabilities. Aug. 28, 2026 Press Contacts Hannah Arceri LARKSPUR, Colo. - Stratus just released its 2026 State of MEP Report: Data Center Edition alongside new features built to help contractors coordinate fabrication at scale. The report is designed to give preconstruction teams, VDC managers, fabrication directors and executives a clear view of where the MEP data center market stands today and what it takes to compete in the years ahead. The findings point to a high-demand market where the ability to scale increasingly depends on fabrication capacity and execution. 82% of data center contractors surveyed expect their revenue share from this work to keep growing over the next two years. With an 88% average prefabrication rate on data center work, and shop space as the top constraint on expanding prefabrication, ahead of even skilled labor, many contractors are already investing in the visibility and technology needed to meet the demand. "Data centers have become one of the fastest-growing and most operationally demanding sectors in construction," said Jake Olsen, CEO of Stratus. "The differentiator is no longer simply who has the most people, it's who has the best system. Contractors who build around manufacturing principles, expand fabrication capacity, and connect production data from the model through the shop and field are better positioned to scale while protecting margin." Key findings from the report include: * Data center work is a growing revenue source: 82% of firms doing data center work expect their revenue share to increase. * Scale and fabrication volume set data center projects apart. Large physical scale is the top differentiator of data center projects compared to other project work. They also carry the highest prefabrication rate of any project type, driven by their sheer scale and repetitive systems, with 88% of data center work now involving fabrication in some form. * Shop capacity is the real bottleneck, but contractors are responding. 68% cite shop space as their top constraint on scaling prefabrication, and 82% have recently or plan to add shop space in the next 2 years. * Winning and delivering require different skills. Track record and GC/owner relationships win the work; prefabrication capability and connected BIM-shop-field workflows are what deliver it. 77% now consider real-time production visibility very important or critical to success. * Technology, not headcount, drives the next efficiency gains. 63% point to technology and automation and 56% to prefab expansion and modular fabrication as the top drivers of efficiency over the next five years. To help contractors keep up with data center demand, Stratus recently introduced two new features to manage fabrication at scale: Modules brings expanded package grouping and multi-model integration capabilities for multi-trade racks, skids, and corridor assemblies to the shop floor, creating a single trackable unit for modular builds in Stratus. 68% of data center contractors already do this kind of modular work today. Enhanced Divisions simplifies cross-shop package routing and assignments for contractors managing multiple shops, increasingly common as data center work goes national. Jason Steele, Senior VDC Manager at Cerris Systems, a national mechanical contracting giant that has completed more than 100 data center projects to date, is seeing that shift firsthand. "Everything is at a rapid speed right now, and we're being challenged by our clients to build faster than we've ever built before," Steele said. "Stratus has allowed us to fabricate at scale. We can track our fabrication from the model through installation and commissioning." The 2026 State of MEP: Data Center Edition provides additional findings on data center revenue growth, fabrication models, capacity constraints, workforce strategies, technology adoption, and the operational capabilities contractors see shaping competitiveness over the next five years.

PR Newswire

Aug 18th, 2026

Stratus launches AI innovation arm with agentic spooling tools for contractors

Stratus, a digital fabrication platform for contractors in piping, plumbing, sheet metal, and electrical trades, has launched Stratus Labs, its AI and innovation division. The announcement was made at Innovate 2026, the company's annual MEP event in Seattle. Stratus Labs released its first experimental tools: agentic spooling capabilities and an MCP server connection. The agentic spooling collection includes Assembly Matcher, Assembly Designer, and Assembly Agent, which automate and predict assembly work across trades. The company also introduced its Big Data MCP Server, allowing customers and partners to build custom workflows using Stratus data. Led by co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Jonathan Umscheid, Stratus Labs formalises the company's approach of rapid development in partnership with customers. The experimental tools are available to Stratus customers upon request.

Informa TechTarget

Aug 17th, 2026

Stratus launches Stratus Labs, its AI and innovation arm, debuting new experiments at Innovate 2026.

Stratus launches Stratus Labs, its AI and innovation arm, debuting new experiments at Innovate 2026. Igniting fast and lasting innovation with AI, partnering directly with customers to build agentic tools on top of Stratus workflow data. Aug. 18, 2026 Press Contacts Hannah Arceri (800) 385-7131 LARKSPUR, Colo. - Stratus, the digital fabrication platform trusted by contractors across piping & plumbing, sheet metal, and electrical trades, today announced Stratus Labs, its new AI and innovation arm, alongside the release of its first set of experiments to customers: agentic spooling capabilities and an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server connection. The announcement was made at Innovate 2026, an annual MEP event hosted by Stratus, held this year in Seattle from August 18-20. Stratus Labs formalizes a way of working the company has followed since its founding: build quickly, in partnership with customers. As AI and agentic tooling have made rapid iteration faster than ever, Stratus is investing in a dedicated team and process to keep building at the pace the technology now allows. The team is led by Jonathan Umscheid, the company's co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, who has been with Stratus since day one. "AI is changing how fast software can move," said Jake Olsen, CEO of Stratus. "We built Stratus Labs to match that pace, putting real data intelligence and agentic workflows directly into customers' hands. They can test those tools, iterate on them, and keep building with us the same way they always have." Agentic Spooling, the first collection of experimental tools to come out of Stratus Labs, brings together three capabilities that automate spooling and assembly work across trades: * Assembly Matcher - Clones existing modeled assemblies - e.g. matching floors of a high-rise. * Assembly Designer - Applies size/weight constraints; breakpoint edits create new assemblies. * Assembly Agent - AI/ML trained on your models to predict new assemblies. The first two automate steps that previously required manual work. Assembly Agent goes further, predicting new assemblies directly rather than automating a manual step. Alongside Stratus Labs, the company also announced its Big Data MCP Server, an experiment that gives AI tools direct access to Stratus's Big Data, so customers and partners can build their own workflows on top of it. Each capability can be accessed and used by Stratus customers in an experimental environment today, upon request, and attendees at Innovate 2026 will be able to preview results firsthand with their own models and data. "This is our flag in the ground," said Jonathan Umscheid, Chief Innovation Officer and co-founder of Stratus. "We wanted the first thing people see out of Stratus Labs to be real, usable value today - not a roadmap promise. Agentic Spooling and our Big Data MCP Server are exactly that." New Stratus Labs experiments are constantly releasing to customers, with over 10 value-adding new features they can opt into today simply by signing up. Learn more about Stratus Labs at labs.stratus.build. Stratus has always operated by building fast with our customers. Stratus Labs continues that tradition as our formal AI and innovation arm, partnering directly with customers to turn real workflow data into agentic tools. For more information, please visit stratus.build,

Stratus

Senior/Lead Site Reliability Engineer

About the job

About the company

Get referred to Stratus

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

What critics are saying

What makes Stratus unique

Benefits

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

1 year growth

2 year growth