About this role.
Mattermost seeks a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to define and lead the reliability strategy for a secure, mission-critical collaboration platform. The role owns architecture and operational excellence across containerized workloads, infrastructure as code, observability, incident response, cloud cost management, and capacity planning. It requires deep hands-on expertise with Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, distributed systems, automation, and production monitoring. The lead will mentor a distributed SRE team and partner with engineering, security, and compliance stakeholders supporting regulated defense and government environments.
Role DNA
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Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
5/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I would begin by mapping critical user journeys, service dependencies, compliance constraints, and current operational risks. I would define service-level indicators and objectives, prioritize reliability investments using error budgets and risk impact, and create a phased roadmap covering observability, resilience, automation, capacity, and disaster recovery. I would review progress regularly with engineering, security, and product leadership.
I would standardize metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting around customer-impacting service indicators. Using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, I would instrument applications and infrastructure, correlate telemetry with deployments and incidents, and tune alerts to be actionable rather than noisy. I would also ensure runbooks and ownership are attached to high-severity alerts.
I would first stabilize the service and establish clear incident command, communications, and decision ownership. I would preserve relevant evidence, follow approved security and change-control processes, provide timely stakeholder updates, and document the technical timeline. After recovery, I would lead a blameless root-cause analysis with concrete corrective actions, owners, and verification criteria.
I would combine demand forecasting, rightsizing, autoscaling, resource quotas, tagging, and cost visibility by service or team. I would identify waste in idle resources, storage, and data transfer while protecting capacity required for SLOs and disaster recovery. Cost reviews should be integrated into architecture and capacity-planning decisions rather than treated as a separate finance exercise.
I would set clear engineering principles, operational standards, and shared definitions of quality, then reinforce them through design reviews, incident reviews, pairing, and documented runbooks. I would create growth plans based on individual strengths and give engineers meaningful ownership of reliability initiatives. Regular asynchronous updates and intentional collaboration rituals would keep a remote team aligned and accountable.
Mattermost is the leading collaborative workflow platform for defense, intelligence, security, and critical infrastructure. Trusted by the U.S. Department of War and Fortune 500s, our platform runs on-premises and in private clouds, delivering secure messaging, file sharing, workflow automation, audio/screenshare, and project management—all with full data and operational control. Mattermost powers high-stakes workflows across mission planning, real-time, real-world operations, DevSecOps, incident response, and cyber defense—enabling secure collaboration from tactical edge and DDIL environments to enterprise HQ. Teams operate across web, desktop, and mobile, with embedded interoperability for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365.
To learn more, visit www.mattermost.com
Mattermost is seeking an experienced and visionary Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to guide the architecture, reliability, and operational excellence of the infrastructure powering our secure, mission-critical collaboration platform.
In this role, you will provide technical leadership across our SRE function, driving strategic initiatives for scalability, observability, performance, and automation across cloud and hybrid environments. You will mentor engineers, establish best practices, and collaborate closely with development, security, and operations teams to ensure our customers in defense, government, and critical infrastructure sectors experience exceptional reliability and performance.
Responsibilities Include:
- Define the strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Mattermost’s site reliability engineering function, aligning infrastructure initiatives with product and business goals.
- Lead the design, deployment, and optimization of production-grade containerized workloads, infrastructure-as-code, and compliant cloud environments for regulated domains (e.g., FedRAMP, DoD).
- Establish and evolve observability, monitoring, and alerting frameworks to ensure performance, reliability, and capacity planning at scale.
- Drive incident management processes, including on-call rotations, root cause analysis, and systemic reliability improvements.
- Partner with security and compliance teams to meet data sovereignty, security, and regulatory requirements.
- Champion automation and operational excellence to improve efficiency, reduce risk, and scale operations.
- Oversee cloud cost management and capacity planning to optimize infrastructure spending while meeting performance targets.
- Build and maintain a developer platform that enables fast, secure software delivery and improves application stability in production.
- Mentor and coach SRE team members, fostering a culture of learning, collaboration, and technical excellence.
Requirements:
- BS in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience, with 5+ years of relevant experience in site reliability engineering, DevOps, or cloud infrastructure roles.
- Proven expertise in container orchestration platforms, ideally Kubernetes.
- Extensive experience with infrastructure-as-code, ideally Terraform.
- Strong background in cloud platforms, ideally AWS.
- Demonstrated experience designing and implementing monitoring, alerting, and performance optimization strategies.
- Exceptional troubleshooting and incident management skills for distributed systems.
- Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language for automation.
- Excellent communication skills with a track record of influencing cross-functional teams.
- Experience leading globally distributed teams in a remote-first environment.
Preferences:
- Familiarity with observability stacks such as Grafana and Prometheus.
- Experience designing high-availability, disaster recovery, and scaling architectures.
- Exposure to GCP and Azure cloud environments.
- Leadership experience in highly regulated industries such as defense, finance, or critical infrastructure.
- Experience with U.S. federal compliance frameworks and authorization processes, including FedRAMP, DoD ATO, NIST 800-53, and related government standards.
- Experience preparing, delivering, and maintaining software offerings through AWS Marketplace and other cloud provider marketplaces (e.g., Azure Marketplace, Google Cloud Marketplace), including packaging, compliance validation, and ongoing operational support.
- Open-source contributions in reliability, DevOps, or infrastructure tooling.
- Certifications in cloud infrastructure, reliability, or DevOps engineering (e.g., CKA, CKAD, AWS Certified Solutions Architect).
Compensation
Salary range: $145,000 – $200,000
Mattermost takes a market-based approach to pay. Compensation is determined based on skills, experience, qualifications, and work location. Ranges may be updated as market conditions evolve..
U.S. Eligibility & Compliance
This role may require obtaining and maintaining a U.S. government security clearance. Candidates must meet federal eligibility requirements to be considered. For more information visit Security Clearances — United States Department of State
Applicants must meet eligibility requirements for access to export-controlled information as defined by U.S. export control laws, including EAR and ITAR. For more information visit the Bureau of Industry and Security and the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls.
Mattermost is an EEO Employer, we are a remote-first, open-source company.
We are continually working to expand our hiring in more countries and regions, ensuring compliance with local laws and regulations, which takes time.
Mattermost values your unique perspective—we welcome all applicants. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply and are committed to assessing candidates based on their skills and qualifications. We do not tolerate discrimination against staff or applicants based on race, religion, national origin, age, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or other personal characteristics.
If you require accommodations during the interview process, please let us know—we’re happy to assist.
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