Sr. Site Reliability Engineer I

Join Axon and be a Force for Good. At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other. Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter. Your Impact Are you an engineer who gets excited about the challenge of making complex distributed systems observable — not just instrumenting them, but designing and running the infrastructure that makes logs, metrics, analytics, and traces useful at scale? In this role, you will help operate and evolve Axon's observability platform, enabling the entire engineering organization to understand and operate their services with confidence. You'll work across the full observability stack: centralized logging (Splunk, Grafana Loki, ClickHouse), metrics (Prometheus, Cortex, Grafana), and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), for every Axon product across multiple clouds and regions, including government and regulated clouds. You'll partner directly with the development organizations that build Axon's software products, and you'll use agentic AI tooling throughout your work. You will be part of the Observability team in Axon's Compute Platform Engineering (CPE) organization, a focused team that brings a traditional SRE and infrastructure background to the observability ecosystem and to all of the systems it monitors. The ideal candidate has a strong infrastructure or software engineering background, ideally a mix of both, and is genuinely interested in low-level, backend systems. You'll thrive here if you have opinions about what good observability looks like, and enjoy the challenge of making it real in a large, fast-moving organization. Location: This role is based out of our Boston, MA, Atlanta, GA, or Seattle, WA office and follows a hybrid schedule. We rely on in-person collaboration and ask that team members work onsite Tuesdays through Fridays, with the flexibility to work remotely on Mondays, unless there is an approved workplace accommodation. What You'll Do Own the architecture and operation of Axon's centralized logging platforms (Splunk, Grafana Loki + Alloy, and ClickHouse for log analytics) Own the architecture and operation of Axon's metrics platforms (Prometheus, Cortex, Grafana), the foundation for alerting, dashboards, and SLO tracking across all of Axon's environments Keep every observability system within its defined SLAs: operate the systems, take part in the on-call rotation, and stay on top of minor alerts before they become bigger issues Establish and run long-term maintenance programs for each major observability component so systems stay secure and up to date Dig into Axon's infrastructure and platform to suggest and refine instrumentation with next-generation metrics, and help teams build meaningful SLOs for their services Drive adoption of distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) across Axon's service-oriented architecture Evaluate and introduce new observability platforms and systems as customer needs and the state of the art move forward Apply agentic AI tooling across all of this work: toolkit commands, agentic on-call helpers, runbook generation, and dashboard scaffolding What You Bring 6+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure, or software engineering (internships and other relevant exposure count); 6+ years for L8 and L9 Relevant hands-on experience, at scale, with at least some of our observability toolkit: Prometheus, Cortex, Grafana, Loki, or ClickHouse Experience with any of the common languages used at Axon: Go, Python, Java, or Scala Experience with container-based platforms at scale (for example Docker and Kubernetes) Experience with Azure or AWS Exposure to service-oriented systems and microservices Strong communication skills: you can understand and negotiate with many different stakeholders to craft a solution within real-world constraints, where the easiest, most obvious answer is not always possible Self-direction, and the ability to learn selectively and in a time-box only what the task at hand needs The ability to focus and manage your time on a team distributed across multiple offices and time zones United States citizenship, required to obtain CJIS clearance for full access to US production environments Preferred Qualifications Exposure to 24/7 high-volume systems with minimal-downtime requirements Experience working in a highly regulated environment (for example Azure Government, FedRAMP/GovRAMP, or CJIS) Experience with infrastructure as code and configuration management tools (for example ArgoCD, Terraform, or CDK) A demonstrated ability to debug complex systems Experience deploying or operating distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Tempo, or similar) Experience with agentic AI tooling or building LLM-powered developer tools Benefits that Benefit You Competitive salary and 401k with employer match Discretionary paid time off Paid parental leave for all Medical, Dental, Vision plans Fitness Programs Emotional & Mental Wellness support Learning & Development programs Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) And yes, we have snacks in our offices Benefits listed herein may vary depending on the nature of your employment and the location where you work. Axon is a total compensation company, meaning compensation is made up of base pay, bonus, and stock awards. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: level, function, training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, geographic market, and often a combination of all these factors. Our ben