Site Reliability Engineer, CI/CD & Load Testing (US-Remote) for Social Good

Give Lively builds better fundraising technology for nonprofits and gives it away for free. Our platform supports donation, fundraising, and event tools used by thousands of nonprofits and donors.

Reliability is central to our mission. When nonprofits need to raise money — especially during high-volume giving periods — our platform needs to be secure, available, observable, and resilient.

About the role

Give Lively is looking for a pragmatic Site Reliability Engineer to improve the reliability, scalability, and operational maturity of our fundraising platform.

This role will bridge development and operations. You’ll help own and improve CI/CD pipelines, release engineering, load testing, Heroku operations, incident response, observability, and production reliability. You’ll help automate manual operational tasks and prepare the platform for high-traffic events like Giving Season.

Our current platform runs primarily on Heroku, Postgres, CloudFront, and CircleCI. The immediate priority is improving reliability, CI/CD performance, deployment confidence, load testing, and Heroku operations. Experience with AWS, Terraform, or PaaS-to-cloud migration is helpful as we evaluate future infrastructure paths, but it is not required on day one.

This is not a role focused on building Kubernetes clusters or microservices from scratch. We’re looking for someone pragmatic who can improve and scale the systems we run today.

What success looks like

You will help Give Lively provide resilient, observable infrastructure that supports a secure and always-available donation platform.

Success means

• The platform is prepared for major giving periods, including a 10x traffic spike during Giving Season.
• CI/CD pipelines are faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain.
• Load testing is designed, executed, analyzed, and translated into action.
• Manual operational tasks are automated or eliminated.
• Incident response is structured and documented.
• Postmortems are clear, blameless, and useful.
• Monitoring and alerting help the team identify issues before donors are impacted.
• Infrastructure decisions are pragmatic and aligned with the platform’s current needs.

What you’ll do

• Own and improve production reliability for Give Lively’s fundraising platform.
• Manage and optimize Heroku infrastructure, dynos, release phases, and Heroku Postgres.
• Improve CircleCI workflows, caching, parallelization, and deployment reliability.
• Design and execute load-testing protocols using tools such as JMeter, Artillery, k6, or similar.
• Prepare the platform for Giving Season and other high-traffic events.
• Support incident response, postmortems, retrospectives, and root cause analysis.
• Improve observability across Heroku, Pingdom, Rails Autoscale, logs, and APM tools.
• Automate operational tasks using Ruby, Bash, Python, or similar scripting.
• Support test infrastructure for Cypress, Katalon, Happo, and visual regression suites.
• Help evaluate future AWS and Terraform infrastructure paths.
• Work closely with engineers and product managers to define reliability goals and SLOs.

Must haves

• 5+ years of experience supporting production web applications or infrastructure.
• Strong CI/CD experience, ideally with CircleCI.
• Experience designing, executing, and analyzing load tests.
• Deep experience with Heroku or similar PaaS environments.
• Experience managing Heroku Postgres or Postgres in production.
• Experience with incident response, on-call rotations, PagerDuty, Statuspage, or similar tools.
• Experience setting up and tuning monitoring, alerting, and observability systems.
• Comfort writing scripts in Ruby, Bash, Python, or similar.
• Solid understanding of HTTP, DNS, CDN behavior, SSL/TLS, and web infrastructure.
• Pragmatic engineering judgment and comfort improving existing production systems.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.

Nice to haves

• Experience with Ruby on Rails applications.
• Experience with CloudFront.
• Experience with AWS.
• Experience with Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code tools.
• Experience migrating applications from Heroku or another PaaS to AWS.
• Experience preparing systems for predictable traffic spikes.
• Experience with Rails Autoscale, Pingdom, PagerDuty, Cypress, Katalon, or Happo.
• Experience defining SLOs or improving operational maturity in a small team.

Current stack

Our applications are built with Ruby on Rails. The core platform uses Heroku, Heroku Postgres, CloudFront, CircleCI, Heroku CI, and Postgres. We use RSpec, Cypress, Katalon, and Happo for test coverage and visual regression. Monitoring and alerting are handled through PagerDuty, Pingdom, Rails Autoscale, and related tools.