About the job
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Zello builds a voice-first communication platform that supports over 175 million users worldwide. The company’s push-to-talk technology helps frontline workers, first responders, and teams stay connected and productive, handling 9 billion messages each month. Zello’s mission centers on supporting critical communication and collaboration for those who need it most.
The backend services team at Zello manages the distributed systems powering every conversation on the platform. As the third engineer on this close-knit team, the Senior Back End Engineer in Austin, Texas will have direct production responsibility for essential services, working without layers of management between their work and its impact.
What you will do
- Act as a senior individual contributor on the backend services team, managing production operations for distributed systems at real-time scale.
- Join on-call rotations for Zello’s most critical infrastructure, lead incident responses, develop runbooks, and drive sustainable improvements after incidents.
- Build and expand observability where needed, set service level objectives (SLOs), and instrument services using Grafana and Loki to shift the team toward proactive reliability.
What success looks like after one year
- Full production ownership of at least one key service, including on-call, SLOs, incident response, and measurable reliability improvements (such as fewer P0 incidents or faster recovery).
- Broader observability coverage through Grafana and Loki dashboards and alerting, helping the team move from reactive to proactive on reliability.
- Delivery of at least three major enhancements in reliability, performance, or system architecture.
- Meaningful contributions to "backend 2.0," Zello’s rearchitecture initiative toward an AI-native engineering approach.

