Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Who We Are

Citizen Health was founded on the belief — shaped by firsthand lived experiences navigating healthcare — that having the right advocate is the single most important factor in achieving better care and outcomes. By uniquely combining data, AI, and community, Citizen is building a personalized AI advocate powered by patients' complete medical histories and data from thousands of other patients to generate personalized insights for clinical decisions and day-to-day challenges. Starting in rare and complex conditions, patients share their data in exchange for value, enabling biopharma and researchers with seamless access to patients and regulatory-grade data, shaving years off drug development for much-needed treatments.

Citizen is founded by experienced entrepreneurs with multiple successes under their belts and is funded by top-tier investors including 8VC, Transformation Capital, and Headline Ventures, among others. We are a mission-driven team excited to be building the future of consumer healthcare.

The Role

Citizen Health is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to ensure the resilience, performance, and availability of our AI-powered, patient-centric healthcare platform.

In this hands-on, high-impact role, you will apply software engineering principles to operational challenges—designing and maintaining reliable systems that scale, fail gracefully, and recover quickly. You'll work cross-functionally to establish SLOs/SLIs, implement robust observability, establish a metrics-driven approach to service performance, and drive improvements in incident response, fault tolerance, and service reliability.

If you're passionate about building systems that stay up, scale well, and recover fast — and you thrive on solving reliability challenges in modern cloud-native environments — we’d love to talk to you.

Responsibilities

Reliability Engineering & Observability

• Define and measure service reliability through SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.

• Implement and operate observability tooling (e.g., NewRelic, Prometheus) across cloud and Kubernetes environments.

• Analyze logs, traces, and metrics to surface actionable insights and improve system health.

• Perform capacity planning, load testing, and performance profiling and tuning to support scale and reliability, and to optimize system performance.

Resilience & Automation

• Design and maintain resilient, self-healing infrastructure in AWS and Kubernetes (EKS).

• Conduct chaos engineering experiments, failure mode analysis, and disaster recovery drills to proactively identify and fix weaknesses.

• Build automation to reduce toil, improve reliability metrics (latency, uptime, error rates, MTTD, and MTTR), and prevent recurrence of incidents.

• Engineer infrastructure for fault tolerance, auto-scaling, and graceful degradation.

Incident Response & Operations

• Drive incident response efforts, manage on-call rotations, and coordinate resolution of production outages.

• Conduct root cause analyses and blameless postmortems to drive learning and resilience.

• Continuously improve key reliability metrics such as latency, uptime, error rates, and availability.

• Collaborate with security, platform, and DevOps teams to ensure high-availability and production-readiness of services.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Culture

• Collaborate with engineering teams during design and architecture phases to assess and mitigate reliability risks.

• Support progressive delivery strategies including feature flags and canary deployments.

• Champion SRE principles and practices, helping build a culture of resilience and shared ownership.

• Stay current with emerging practices in cloud reliability, observability, and SRE tooling.

Who You Are

You are a hands-on individualwho thrives in fast-paced, high-stakes environments where reliability is mission-critical. You bring deep experience operating distributed systems at scale, with a strong foundation in cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, and observability.

You think like a software engineer but focus like an operator, using code to solve operational challenges. You’re driven by making systems more resilient, reducing downtime, and building fault-tolerant architectures that scale with user demand. You value data-driven decision making, and see SLIs/SLOs, incident postmortems, and continuous improvement as essential tools, not checkboxes.

You have a strong sense of ownership, thrive under pressure, and believe the best systems are the ones that heal themselves. You collaborate closely across teams, care deeply about the end-user experience, and are always looking for better ways to keep complex systems running smoothly.

Must-Have Skills

• 5+ years in Site Reliability, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering roles.

• Strong software engineering skills in languages such as Python, Go, or Bash.

• Deep expertise operating production systems in AWS, with additional experience in GCP or Azure.

• Proven experience operating and scaling Kubernetes (EKS) in production.

• Experience implementing GitOps with FluxCD (or similar).

• Hands-on experience implementing observability, auto-scaling, and self-healing systems.

• Strong foundation in networking, load balancing, CDN, and container orchestration.

• Solid knowledge of performance optimization techniques (e.g. profiling, caching, tuning)

• Strong incident response background, including postmortems and SLO/SLI development, driving improvements through data and analysis.

• Passion for reliability, automation, operational excellence, and building systems patients and clinicians can trust.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

• A methodical approach to problem-solving and system design

Preferred Skills

• Deep understanding of distributed systems, fault tolerance, and failure modes.

• Experience implementing chaos engineering practices (Gremlin, Chaos Mesh, etc.)

• Familiarity with multi-region, multi-cloud reliability strategies

• Experience with service meshes (e.g., Istio) and resilience patterns

• Solid background in security, compliance, and operational hardening (HIPAA, SOC 2)

• Experience in capacity planning, scaling, and disaster recovery design

Why Join Us?

At Citizen Health, you will be part of an ambitious mission to build innovative AI-driven solutions that redefine the consumer healthcare experience and improve outcomes for millions. We value curiosity, creativity, and collaboration, and we believe in empowering every team member to have an impact. Here, you’ll find:

• The chance to work on pioneering AI technologies and solve complex problems that push the boundaries of what’s possible in healthcare

• The freedom to lead your projects and shape the company’s direction in a mission-driven environment where your work makes a real impact

• A fast-paced, high-growth setting that brings expanding opportunities and clear paths for career progression

• A supportive culture of learning, experimentation, and innovation, where new ideas are encouraged and explored

• A commitment to empathy and diversity, recognizing that our greatest strengths come from our varied perspectives and experiences

• Regular team activities and knowledge sharing, all within a culture that prioritizes well-being and connection

Additional Perks

• Competitive salary + equity package

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance

• Unlimited paid time off, including a generous parental leave

• Flexible hybrid work environment

Don't meet every qualification? No worries! We believe that passion, curiosity, and the right mindset are just as important as a checklist of skills. If you’re excited about what we’re building, we encourage you to apply.

Our Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: Citizen Health is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences. Everyone deserves an equal chance to contribute and grow here — regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.