The Big Picture

Do you enjoy applying your creative and technical skills to technology that impacts peoples’ lives for good? Do you thrive in a fast-paced and collaborative environment? As part of Zoobean’s product team, you will have the opportunity to help shape products that build lifelong reading habits for readers all around the world.

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) applies a software engineering mindset to solve complex infrastructure and operational challenges. Working closely with our Staff SRE and the entire engineering team, your mission will be to scale our platform’s reliability and performance for the next 10 million readers. You will build automated, scalable solutions that empower our software engineers to ship with speed and confidence.

You will join a kind, generous, and entrepreneurial crew of over forty full-time teammates, including ten product team members. The best part is that you get a unique opportunity to use your strengths and skills to challenge others to read more. After all, reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body.

Responsibilities

• As an SRE, you will share responsibility for the health and performance of our production services on Heroku and AWS, using monitoring tools to proactively identify and resolve issues.
• Help define and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for our key services, using data to drive conversations and decisions about reliability work.
• Optimize application and database performance by identifying bottlenecks (e.g., N+1 queries), recommending improvements, and implementing code or infrastructure refactors.
• Collaborate closely with the backend team to take ownership of performance-critical components of the application. You’ll be expected to refactor inefficient code, proactively navigate the codebase to identify bottlenecks, and actively contribute code to improve overall system performance.
• Champion the developer experience at Zoobean by collaborating on the improvement of our CI/CD pipelines, streamlining development environments, and reducing friction from local development all the way to production.
• Build and maintain our infrastructure using Terraform, championing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices.
• Collaborate with the CTO and software engineers to implement and maintain security best practices across our infrastructure and applications.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to respond to and resolve production incidents.
• Attend daily product standups, periodic product planning sessions, and team meetings.

Skills and Experience

• 3-5+ years of experience in a Site Reliability (SRE), DevOps, Platform, or any role that involved managing Infrastructure even if it was not your primary responsibility.
• Deep experience managing applications on Heroku and AWS.
• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), specifically Terraform.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, preferably with GitHub Actions.
• Strong understanding of web application performance, with experience diagnosing and fixing issues in a Ruby on Rails environment (e.g., database indexing, memory usage, query optimization).
• Strong coding skills are essential, you must be comfortable writing production-grade code and willing to work across languages as needed. You should be confident in navigating complex systems, identifying performance bottlenecks, and refactoring code for efficiency and maintainability.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools like New Relic, ScoutAPM, or Sentry.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to debug complex issues across the stack.

A Big Plus

• A background in software development, particularly with Ruby on Rails.
• A strong passion for developer enablement and building tools that developers love.
• Experience with containerization technologies like Docker.
• Experience working in a startup environment—able to juggle multiple projects and switch tasks throughout the day.
• BA/BS degree in Computer Science, related degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience working with a remote team.
• Ability to work standard hours in EST or CST time zones.

Salary and Benefits

• Salary will range from $125,000 to $175,000 commensurate with qualifications and experience
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401K Plan with company match
• Participation in company’s stock incentive plan
• Participation in company's quarterly bonus plan for employees
• Work from home with the option to have the company lease co-working space on your behalf
• $500 home office setup stipend
• Optionally participate in our annual team “break” where we kick back together at a resort
• At least 15 vacation days annually + a one week winter break from Xmas Eve to New Year's Day
• Office closed for all federal holidays
• $1,200 annual professional development stipend

About Us

Zoobean’s flagship products help people achieve reading goals by tracking reading and participating in reading challenges. We serve more than 10,000 public library and school clients in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Over ten million readers currently use our platform, Beanstack, to track their reading, earn incentives, and stay motivated to read.

Our Shark Tank appearance brought us Mark Cuban as an investor. We have since picked up Kapor Capital, Militello Capital, AlphaLab Gear, RevUp Capital, and the AT&T Aspire Accelerator as believers and backers to our wonderful cause. Our customers range from big to small and include the Los Angeles Public Library, the Hawaii Department of Education, and the Department of Defense.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We believe diversity breeds innovation. We're building a product that helps librarians, educators, and families everywhere, and to do that well, we need a workforce that’s representative of the population we serve. We are actively looking to add members to our team who will bring diverse backgrounds, new perspectives, and a willingness to challenge us to improve the work we do every day.

From the Heart

At Zoobean, we live out three core values that are represented in our logo:

• Love: We are passionate about the work we do and give everything we can to our customers, investors, and each other.
• Inclusion: Our company grew out of a calling to help children and families see themselves in the books they read. That same commitment to diversity runs through all we do and gives each of us an opportunity to express our full selves while feeling a sense of belonging to a larger community.
• Awesomeness: This one speaks for itself.

If this hits you in the heart and mind, then come work with us.