Senior Engineer, Application SRE

Job Title: Senior Engineer - Application SRE

Location: Bangalore ( India)

About Circles.Life

Founded in 2014, Circles is a global technology company reimagining the telco industry with its SaaS platform - Circles X, helping telco operators launch and operate successful digital brands through its offerings.

Having pioneered a successful blueprint for disrupting the telco space in Singapore, Circles has since launched its own digital telco, Circles.Life, in Singapore, Taiwan and Australia. Circles has also partnered with other telco operators to launch digital services, enabling our partners to accelerate growth and capture market share within a short period of time.

Today, Circles is partnering with operators in 14 countries to deliver delightful digital experiences to millions of people through our businesses.

We are backed by global investors such as Sequoia, Warburg Pincus, EDBI and Founders Fund – renowned backers of industry-shaking innovators.

Position Overview

We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer - Application SRE to join our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. In this role, you will be responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of our mission-critical applications. You will leverage your software engineering skills to build tools, automate processes, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver high-performance, scalable systems. As a senior member of the team, you will take ownership of application reliability and guide other engineers in following best practices for maintaining high-quality services.

Objective of this role

• Understanding and documenting the performance and scalability non-functional requirements, including SLI/SLOs. Validating requirements with business stakeholders.
• Manage SLI/SLOs of customer-facing interfaces as well as backend services and provide improvement plans for non-compliance.
• Develop custom dashboards in observability platforms (New Relic/Dynatrace/Grafana etc.) to represent a holistic view of system operational health
• Improve reliability, quality, and time-to-market of our suite of software solutions
• Support release engineering by providing automation support as well as pushing changes to production when manual intervention needed
• Measure and optimize system performance, with an eye toward pushing our capabilities forward, getting ahead of customer needs, and innovating to continually improve
• Provide primary operational support and engineering for multiple large distributed software applications

Key Responsibilities

• Application Reliability Engineering: Lead efforts to design and implement systems that ensure the high availability, scalability, and reliability of critical applications.
• Incident Management: Drive incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation for application-related issues, ensuring rapid resolution and preventing recurrence.
• Problem Management: Conduct 5-why analysis on issues related to application design, code, and configuration to arrive at the best possible cause and solution for arresting them.
• Automation and Tooling: Develop and maintain automation tools to improve application deployment, monitoring, and scaling, minimizing manual work and reducing time-to-recovery during incidents.
• Performance Tuning: Analyze and resolve application performance bottlenecks, collaborating with developers to optimize code and infrastructure to improve response times and throughput.
• Monitoring and Observability: Architect and implement robust monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to gain deep visibility into application performance and health. Use tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or New Relic.
• Service-Level Objectives (SLOs): Establish and maintain service-level objectives (SLOs) and indicators (SLIs) that ensure operational excellence, working with stakeholders to balance reliability and innovation.
• Collaboration with Engineering Teams: Work closely with software development teams to embed SRE best practices into the application lifecycle, ensuring reliability is built into all stages of development.
• Capacity Planning and Scalability: Monitor application traffic and infrastructure capacity, proactively scaling systems to handle growth and ensure smooth application operation during peak loads.
• Mentorship and Leadership: Mentor junior SREs and software engineers on best practices for reliability engineering and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
• Continuous Improvement: Lead post-incident reviews and retrospectives, driving improvements to system architecture, operational practices, and incident response processes.

Required Skills and Experience

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, or a related role.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Java, Ruby) and strong scripting skills (e.g., Bash, Python).
• Hands-on experience in Spring boot, GoLang, React.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring, observability, and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic) to track system performance and health.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) and cloud-native architectures, including containers and orchestration tools (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).
• Expertise in building and managing CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation.
• Troubleshooting experience, including troubleshooting complex distributed systems in production, performing root cause analysis, and developing remediation strategies.
• Familiarity with microservice architectures and distributed systems at scale.
• Strong understanding of containers, networking, databases, and performance optimization techniques.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across teams and mentor others.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments.
• Knowledge of security best practices for applications and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience leading blameless postmortems and implementing long-term fixes.
• Familiarity with database management systems (SQL, NoSQL) and caching technologies.