Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Flickr at SmugMug in Remote

Job Title: Software Engineer 3 - Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Flickr

Job Level: IC3

Location: Remote, within approved U.S. states (see below)

Help Power Flickr

Flickr is one of the world's largest photography communities and has been helping people store, discover, share, and preserve their photos for more than two decades. Every day, Flickr's infrastructure supports millions of photographers and manages billions of photos and videos that represent some of life's most important moments.

We're looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help build, operate, and evolve the systems behind Flickr. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on reliability, automation, scalability, and operational excellence across our AWS-based platform.

If you enjoy solving complex infrastructure challenges, improving production systems, automating repetitive work, and operating services at meaningful scale, we'd love to talk with you.

Your Opportunity

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you'll help operate and improve the infrastructure that powers Flickr.

You'll work across cloud infrastructure, automation, observability, incident response, and platform reliability. You'll partner closely with software engineers, product teams, and support teams to ensure Flickr remains reliable, scalable, and performant for photographers around the world.

Compensation: Awesome is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The salary range for this role is $132,000- $190,300. This position is also remote-friendly, and as such, compensation will ultimately be in line with the location in which the position is filled. Various factors, such as defined competency leveling and geographic location, will determine the final compensation for this role.

Benefits: Health, dental, vision insurance with 100% premium coverage for you and dependents • Health Savings Account contributions covering 90%+ of annual deductible • 401(k) with company match and immediate vesting • Professional development and learning opportunities • Remote work support (internet, fitness, coworking space reimbursements) • Company-sponsored therapy and coaching sessions

In This Role, You Will:

• Own the reliability, performance, and scalability of acquisition-critical systems on AWS, including signup, login, onboarding, and the signed-out experience.
• Build and operate abuse prevention and traffic classification infrastructure that keeps bad actors out while keeping signup friction low for real photographers.
• Ship quickly and iterate. This pod moves at the pace of experimentation, and your infrastructure work will enable rapid A/B testing and safe, frequent deploys.
• Instrument and monitor the funnel. You'll connect infrastructure health to business metrics like net new subscribers and onboarding completion, so we know immediately when reliability issues are costing us growth.
• Support user data compliance at the point of acquisition, partnering with engineering and product to make sure we handle new user data correctly from day one.
• Participate in and help lead incident response for acquisition-critical systems, including troubleshooting, coordination, root cause analysis, and corrective action. This includes joining a shared on-call rotation with the other operations engineers at Flickr, with blameless postmortems and a strong focus on automation that keeps the pager quiet.
• Build automation and tooling that reduces operational burden so the pod can spend more time shipping and less time firefighting.
• Partner daily with frontend and backend engineers, product management, and marketing to improve conversion, performance, and the new user experience.
• Direct business impact: your work maps to a metric the whole company watches — net new subscribers.
• Greenfield ownership: you'll be the founding ops engineer on this pod, defining how reliability, observability, and safety work for the growth surface area.
• Trust and safety depth: abuse prevention and acquisition safety are hard, evolving problems at scale, and you'll help shape our approach.
• Modern and legacy together: Flickr runs a mature platform with two decades of history alongside modern AWS-native services. You'll work across both, and modernizing the acquisition path is part of the job.
• Fast-moving pod: this team ships and iterates quickly. If you like tight cycles, visible wins, and pragmatic tradeoffs, you'll thrive here.

What You Bring:

• 5+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or a related field.
• Strong experience building and operating production systems in AWS.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, including Terraform.
• Experience managing distributed systems and cloud-native architectures at scale.
• Deep understanding of monitoring, alerting, incident response, troubleshooting, and production operations.
• Experience improving operational processes through automation, tooling, and system design.
• Strong Linux, networking, and systems fundamentals.
• Ability to independently drive projects and solve complex technical problems.
• A bias toward shipping. You're comfortable making pragmatic tradeoffs, delivering incrementally, and iterating based on data.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across teams.
• A strong sense of ownership and accountability for production systems and operational outcomes.

Bonus Points For Experience With:

• Large-scale storage systems, media platforms, image processing, content delivery, or asset management systems.
• AWS services such as ECS, Lambda, S3, CloudFront, Route53, and related technologies.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, CI/CD, and deployment automation.
• Operating systems that serve millions of users or manage large volumes of customer content.
• Experience working across modern and legacy production systems, including technologies such as PHP, Vespa, or similar platforms.
• Growth engineering, conversion funnels, signup/auth systems, or experimentation platforms.
• Abuse prevention, bot mitigation, fraud detection, or trust and safety infrastructure.
• Photography, creator tools, or products serving creative communities.

Beyond Technical Skills:

The engineers who thrive on this team are:

• Curious, pragmatic problem-solvers who enjoy understanding complex systems.
• Curious, fast, pragmatic problem-solvers who would rather ship, measure, and iterate than perfect in isolation.
• Energized by seeing their work show up in business metrics.
• Comfortable owning production systems and responding to incidents.
• Collaborative teammates who proactively drive improvements and share knowledge.

What We Offer You:

**Comprehensive Benefits**

• Health, dental, vision insurance - 100% premium coverage for employee and dependents

• HSA contributions covering 90%+ of annual deductible

• 401(k) with company match and immediate vesting

• A 4-day work week

• Unlimited PTO (and we mean it!)

• Learning & development opportunities for personal and professional growth

• Remote work stipends (internet, fitness, coworking space)

• Company-sponsored therapy and coaching sessions

• Flexible spending accounts available

• Company-sponsored phone plan

• A fully remote work environment (+ a coworking space reimbursement if you prefer)

***Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis up until 7/15/26***

A Little About Us

Our purpose is simple: building a better world through the power of photography. For over two decades, we have led the photography industry and thrived as a private, mission-focused, values-led company. We are a Certified Evergreen brand. We are also a Certified Great Place to Work, Climate Neutral Certified, and members of the Conservation Alliance.

We’re building iconic brands that connect people through photography and unleash the value of the stories they tell. We make products that thrill photographers of all types, crafting experiences that empower them to preserve their precious memories, share their art, and run their businesses.

A career at Awesome is much more than a job. Our people come first, and we invest in their growth and prioritize their well-being. Your work will contribute to our mission while leaving a positive, lasting impact on our community and our world.

Our expanding family of brands includes SmugMug, Flickr and MODE Events.

Work Authorization: Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. Please note that we are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position.

Location: This is a remote position, and candidates must be physically located in one of the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.

All employees must perform work duties from a Company-approved location. Any change to your remote work location, whether temporary or permanent, requires prior approval from your manager and the People Team.

EEOC Statement:

Awesome seeks to thrill customers around the world, and building a diverse team is essential to our success. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status, medical condition, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. We encourage diverse candidates to apply and are dedicated to fostering an inclusive and respectful workplace for all. We’re committed to providing equal opportunities and cultivating an inclusive culture. We believe that embracing diversity is integral to innovation and progress.

ADA Requirements:

At Awesome, we strive to create an accessible and inclusive application and selection process. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to job applicants with disabilities to facilitate their participation in the recruitment, selection, and assessment processes. Should you require an accommodation, please contact our People Operations Team by email at jobs@smugmug.com, and we will work with you to meet your accessibility needs.

AI Use Restrictions:

While we may encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application and during the interview processes. We want to understand your personal interest in Awesome without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted skills.*

*This requirement does not apply to those who require the use of AI for necessary accommodations.