Job Description
Thinkific is a learning commerce platform that helps learning businesses turn knowledge into impact. By bringing together community, courses, and content with commerce, we power transformative learning experiences that help businesses grow their revenue—and reach millions of learners around the world.
We’re a team of 300+ Thinkers building products that matter. Every role at Thinkific contributes to raising the bar for online learning, supporting learning businesses, and creating real-world impact. You’ll work alongside curious, collaborative teammates who care deeply about what they build and who they build it for.
We’re committed to a fair, inclusive, and human hiring experience. Our team is here to guide you every step of the way, so you always know what to expect!
Are you an experienced Site Reliability Engineer looking for a new challenge? We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join us at Thinkific.
We’re looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join us at Thinkific. As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you will help us scale and secure the infrastructure that powers thousands of online course creators around the world.
In this role, you’ll play a critical role in improving the performance, reliability, and security of our platform. You’ll work cross-functionally with engineers, product managers, and stakeholders to drive forward reliability-focused initiatives, build scalable systems, and mentor others. You’ll also help shape our technical strategy, lead major infrastructure projects, and act as a domain expert in modern cloud-native practices, with a specific emphasis on Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (AWS), observability, and service reliability.
Your goal will be to help guide and execute on projects related to your technical domain. Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:
- Own one or more technical domains across our infrastructure with accountability for system reliability, performance, scalability, and security
- Lead projects to evolve our Kubernetes-based platform, ensuring alignment with SLOs, security best practices, and long-term maintainability
- Contribute to the design and evolution of our infrastructure using Terraform, Helm, and cloud-native tools, with an emphasis on modularity, reuse, and automation
- Partner with engineering teams to design robust deployment pipelines, ensure operational readiness, and build secure-by-default patterns for new services
- Lead incident response efforts and participate in on-call rotation, driving a culture of blameless postmortems and learning
- Write infrastructure and application code in Ruby, Node.js, Python, or Bash to automate operations and improve developer experience
- Serve as a mentor and multiplier, raising the technical bar through coaching, knowledge sharing, and technical leadership
- Actively promote observability, testing, and continuous improvement in everything you build and advocate for within your team
- Participate in our on-call rotation and incident response processes to help maintain a high level of service reliability
The person we have in mind likely:
- Has 6+ years of experience in software or infrastructure engineering, including 4+ years working with Kubernetes in production environments
- Holds a CKA certification or equivalent hands-on Kubernetes expertise (bonus for experience managing multi-tenant clusters or complex networking in K8s)
- Has deep knowledge of TLS, certificates, ciphers, and encryption protocols, and can explain how they secure communications in a distributed system
- Has production experience with AWS infrastructure and services (EKS, RDS, IAM, ALB, S3, etc.)
- Writes infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, and has built scalable and secure infrastructure following modular and reusable patterns
- Is comfortable with monitoring and observability tooling (e.g., New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry) and building alerting based on meaningful SLOs
- Has experience supporting distributed systems with relational and non-relational databases (PostgreSQL, AWS Aurora), message queues (Sidekiq, SNS/SQS), and asynchronous architectures
- Enjoys collaborating across teams and helping shape engineering roadmaps and architectural direction
- Brings a strong ownership mentality, cares deeply about developer experience and operational excellence, and thrives in a fast-paced environment
- Loves to learn and grow. They’ve found (and keep looking for) ways to level up their skills in this field, whether that’s through formal education, gaining professional experience, or maybe even building their own business
These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:
- Experience with Database Administration (DBA) practices, including performance tuning, replication strategies, backup and recovery planning, and operational support for PostgreSQL or AWS Aurora environments
- Experience working with Ruby on Rails and/or Node.js applications in production
- Familiarity with Cloudflare, load balancing strategies, and CDN configuration
- Experience improving CI/CD pipelines and secure software supply chains
We’re committed to fair and transparent pay that reflects both where you’re at and where you can grow. This role has a salary range of $132,900 – $166,100 – $182,900 in Canada, designed to capture the full journey from developing skills to excelling in the position. Most new hires start between the minimum and midpoint, which aligns with being fully capable in the role. Salaries above the midpoint are typically reserved for team members who have demonstrated strong, consistent performance, deep expertise, and a significant positive impact within the role.
For high-demand or hard-to-fill positions like this one, we may hire above midpoint for candidates who bring exceptional experience, skills, or impact potential.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility
This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.
We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.
What you can expect if you join Thinkific:
👏 An amazing team of talented, passionate, and kind Thinkers. Together, we’ve built an amazing, award-winning culture—we’re a Certified Great Place to Work and one of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures by Waterstone!
🚀 The chance to build, improve, and innovate on a platform that’s driving positive impact for thousands of businesses and millions of students around the world.
💸 A competitive compensation package including base salary, equity, team-wide bonuses, and an Employee Share Purchase Plan.
🌴 Flexible Paid Time Off to maintain mental and physical health. Our team is encouraged to take a minimum 4 weeks of vacation, plus Thinker Holidays (extended long weekends in the summer) and time off for the December holiday season.
🩺 Health Benefits and Wellness: Comprehensive benefits starting on Day 1 include health, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family, $3,000 for mental health care, a short-term health plan, and an additional $900/year health or personal spending account. Plus, family friendly benefits include generous parental leave top-ups for up to 32 weeks, as well as fertility coverage and personalized return to work options.
🤝 3 Paid Volunteer Days each year to give back to your community and support the causes you care about.
💻 Flexible Work. Choose to work from home from anywhere in Canada, at our Vancouver HQ, a co-working space, or anywhere there’s wifi for a change of scenery.
⬆️ Learning & Growth. An annual $2,000 CAD Learn and Grow fund for conferences, seminars, or courses, plus training, mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities.
🏡 A home office setup so you’re ready to succeed with a company-owned Macbook Pro and a budget to order a desk, chair, or any accessories to help you work comfortably and productively.
💙 A place where you can bring your whole self to work. We know that different perspectives lead to amazing ideas, more innovation, and, ultimately, our success as a company. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, identities, and statuses. Whoever you are—we can’t wait to meet you!
The Thinkific Vancouver office operates on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations of the Coast Salish People. We encourage everyone to learn more about the original caretakers of the land that you currently occupy.
