Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

$160,000 - $180,000 + VIP Bonus

$160,000 - $180,000 / year + Bonus

The insurance industry runs on Vertafore. We equip agencies, MGAs, and carriers with the core digital systems, specialized AI, and data-driven foundation to eliminate distribution drag across the insurance lifecycle, spanning sales, servicing, and back-office operations.

Underpinned by unmatched speed and performance power, we are the trusted backbone that’s taking the insurance industry from friction to flow with Distribution Velocity – speed, performance, and trust - to drive growth at scale.

With over 95% of the top agencies and insurers and 50% of industry compliance transactions running through Vertafore, we lead at the intersection of innovation and trust, giving insurance professionals the confidence to transform and win in the AI era.

Our reach is global, with headquarters in Denver, Colorado, and offices across the U.S., Canada, and India.

We are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to define the strategic vision and own the enterprise-wide reliability, scalability, and performance of our critical production services. As a foundational pillar of our engineering organization, this role drives architectural standards for the full-service lifecycle—from initial design and deployment readiness to proactive production operations. At Vertafore, we view reliability as a core engineering responsibility. You will operate autonomously across AWS, hybrid data centers, and customer-hosted environments, setting the technical direction for how we treat operations as a software engineering challenge. This role is pivotal in transitioning cross-departmental teams toward a highly proactive, engineering-first culture.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership & Reliability Architecture

• Enterprise-Wide Ownership : Define the standards for end-to-end service ownership, holding the organization accountable for availability, performance, and overall operational health.

• Architectural Influence : Lead cross-departmental initiatives to influence system design at the architectural level, driving fault tolerance, strict compliance, and operational sustainability across public and private clouds.

• Advanced Observability Vision : Dictate the enterprise strategy for observability frameworks, ensuring the Four Golden Signals (Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation) provide actionable, predictive insights across all platforms.

Strategic Leadership & Reliability Architecture

• Enterprise-Wide Ownership : Define the standards for end-to-end service ownership, holding the organization accountable for availability, performance, and overall operational health.

• Architectural Influence : Lead cross-departmental initiatives to influence system design at the architectural level, driving fault tolerance, strict compliance, and operational sustainability across public and private clouds.

• Advanced Observability Vision : Dictate the enterprise strategy for observability frameworks, ensuring the Four Golden Signals (Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation) provide actionable, predictive insights across all platforms.

Data-Driven Reliability Governance

• SLO & Error Budget Authority : Establish the governance models for defining and managing SLIs and SLOs across multiple product lines.

• Delivery Alignment : Champion Error Budgets as the ultimate technical arbiter at the executive level, balancing feature velocity with the absolute requirement for platform stability.

Incident Management & Cultural Transformation

• Enterprise Incident Command : Lead incident response for the most critical, high-severity events.

• Blameless Culture Champion : Foster a "Win Together" environment by championing a Blameless Postmortem culture globally, ensuring root cause analyses focus strictly on systemic and process improvements rather than individual error.

Qualifications & Requirements

• Experience : 12 to 15+ years of hands-on Cloud Operations, SRE, or reliability-focused engineering experience, with a proven track record of end-to-end enterprise service ownership.

• Proven Scope : Demonstrated ability to operate at a Principal/Architect scope, driving large-scale reliability outcomes and operational excellence across global organizations.

• Software Engineering : Expert-level software engineering skills in C#, .NET, Java, Python, or React.

• Principles : Deep expertise in scaling core SRE principles (SLIs, SLOs, error budgets) across complex, distributed systems.

• Technical Stack : Mastery of AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure-as-Code, and extensive knowledge of Linux and Windows environments and relational databases.

• Education : Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

• Commitment : Participation in an executive on-call rotation with flexible hours as required

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• A fast learner.
• A problem solver.
• Ability to document procedures.
• Able to meet deadlines.
• Good communication skills. Able to deliver the message effectively to a technical and non-technical audience.
• Able to comply with processes and procedures.
• Able to maintain professional composure in any situations.
• Flexible in working extended hours on occasions or as required.
• Exposure in the insurance industry is desired but not mandatory.
• Driven to improve, personally and professionally
• Operate best in a fast-paced, flexible work environment with ability to work in a team.

Additional Requirements and Details:

• High speed internet to accommodate working from home needs.
• Occasional lifting and/or moving up to 10 pounds.
• Frequent repetitive hand and arm movements required to operate a computer.
• Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision (working on a computer, etc.).
• Frequent sitting and/or standing.

THE VERTAFORE STORY

Over the past 50 years, Vertafore has advanced the entire insurance distribution channel with the best software solutions in the industry. Today, we’re proud to say hundreds of thousands of Vertafore users rely on our solutions to write business faster, reduce costs, and fuel growth by increasing collaboration and streamlining processes. Vertafore leads the industry with secure, cloud-based mobile products that provide superior reporting and analytics, delivering actionable insight— right when customers need it most. We partner with other leading technology companies to deliver comprehensive solutions to improve the way our customers do business and serve their customers.

The Vertafore Way

Insurance is about relationships, and technology should make those relationships stronger. That’s why, at Vertafore, it’s our mission to transform the way the industry operates by putting people at the heart of insurance technology. By focusing on our customers, becoming better every day, and delivering results you can see, we provide the level of trust and security that insurance is all about.

· Bias to Action: We're united by an innate drive to take action and make a difference in the technology and insurance spaces.

· Win Together: We work together as one team, showing empathy and respect along the way.

· Show Up Curious: We work to challenge one another to push boundaries and think beyond the box.

· Say It, Do It: We honor every one of our commitments because integrity is important to us.

· Customer Success is Our Success: We cultivate authentic relationships and follow up by actively listening to their needs.

· We Love Insurance: We appreciate the impact insurance has on the world.

Is this role not an exact fit for you? Keep an eye on our Careers Page for other positions!

Vertafore is a drug free workplace and conducts preemployment drug and background screenings .

The selected candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the job responsibilities, duties, skill, or working conditions. In addition, this document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an "at will" relationship.

Vertafore strongly supports equal employment opportunity for all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law.

We do not accept resumes from agencies, headhunters, or other suppliers who have not signed a formal agreement with us.