Contract: Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Why You'll Love This Role:

As a Senior Site Reliability Contractor, you will be involved in coding infrastructure automation with Terraform and Github Actions CI/CD. In this role, you will focus on improving our monitoring using Datadog, Sentry, and Cloudwatch. It will be critical to improve and automate our release processes to deploy Newsela services. You will have the opportunity to develop a rapport with a domain of application developers to improve infrastructure and monitoring for Newsela services in their ownership

What You'll Be Doing:

• Be on an on-call rotation to respond to incidents that impact Newsela.com availability and provide support for developers during internal and external incidents
• Maintain and assist in extending our infrastructure with Terraform, Github Actions CI/CD, Prefect, and AWS services
• Build monitoring that alerts on symptoms rather than outages using Datadog, Sentry and CloudWatch
• Look for ways to turn repeatable manual actions into automations to reduce on-call toil
• Improve operational processes (such as deployments, releases, migrations, etc) to make them run seamlessly with fault tolerance in mind
• Design, build and maintain core cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP that enables scaling to support thousands of concurrent users
• Debug production issues across services and levels of the stack
• Provide infrastructure and architectural planning support as an embedded team member within a domain of Newsela’s application developers
• Plan the growth of Newsela’s infrastructure

About You:

• Technical

  • Infrastructure as code: use Terraform and Github CI/CD for automation, containerize our environments (Docker, ECS), and leverage cloud technologies to meet our goals
  • Systems: manage, configure and troubleshoot operating system issues, storage (block and object), networking (VPCs, proxies and CDNs), and administer high-availability datastores (mySQL, Postgres, Neo4J) and Redis clusters
  • Monitoring and instrumentation: implement metrics in Datadog, Sentry, log management and related systems, and Slack/JIRA integrations
  • Engineering practices: availability, reliability and scalability, as well as disaster recovery
  • Work in a variety of languages: Shell, IaC, Python, SQL

  Execution

  • Planning: familiarity with agile methodologies; use epics, issues to drive projects
  • Organization: personal and team workload organization, OKR leadership
  • Management: able to self-organize and accomplish tasks asynchronously

  Collaboration and Communication

  • Leading and contributing to scope and designs for issues, epics, and OKRs
  • Contributing to Newsela architecture diagrams, process diagrams and runbook documentation
  • Completing Root Cause Analysis (RCA) investigations and perform readiness reviews
  • Improving team practices through code reviews, handoffs of work and incidents

  Influence and Maturity

  • Knowledge sharing, mentoring within SRE and developer teams
  • Self-awareness, handling conflict in the team, providing and receiving feedback
  • Maintaining good relationships with other engineering teams at Newsela that help improve the product
  • Accountability: willing to proactively step in and do the right thing while providing candid and constructive feedback

Please note that given the nature of the contract, this role will not be eligible to participate in company-sponsored benefits.

Why you’ll love working at Newsela:

• Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical benefits with employer contribution to premiums and to HSA accounts. Additional benefits such as gym reimbursement, pet insurance, free access to the Calm app, Rocket Lawyer and more to help you stay healthy: mind, body, and soul.
• Work From Home: We are a fully remote company. We provide a monthly tech stipend to support your WFH needs!
• Supporting ALL Families: Inclusive benefits to support you and your family, including parental leave, fertility support, adoption, and more!
• Financial Wellbeing: Invest in your future with our 401(k) plan, which includes a employer match to help you build long-term financial security.
• Time Off: Flexible PTO, paid sick time off, company holidays plus winter break (Dec 24th - Jan 1st).
• Professional Development:Newsela offers an annual learning and development allowance to employees to attend external training sessions, classes, workshops, conferences, and educational materials to foster professional growth within their current role and career aspirations at Newsela.
• Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

About Newsela:

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.