Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Good Systems is the parent company behind Goodnotes, where millions of people capture and develop their ideas.
Goodnotes is where we started, and it’s now the foundation for a growing family of products. By reimagining how we interact with information, we’re bringing together human creativity and the breakthrough capabilities of AI.
We build products that help people turn good thinking into good work.

Our Values

Dream big

• Be visionary, strategic, and open to innovation

Build great things

• Work in service of our users, always improving and pushing higher

Operate like an owner

• Take responsibility with bold decision-making and bias for action

Win like a sports team

• Be trusting and collaborative while empowering others

Learn and grow fast

• Never stop learning and iterate fast

Share our passion

• Share ideas and practice enthusiasm and joy

Be user obsessed

• Empathetic, inquisitive, practical

About the role

As a Senior SRE Engineer, you’ll join the founding SRE team for New Goodnotes, our next-generation flagship product. You’ll own its operational quality: how reliably it runs, how well it performs, how early we spot problems, and how effectively we recover when things go wrong.

You’ll work closely with Product and Platform Engineers to set reliability goals and deliver improvements across infrastructure and application code. From investigating a production incident to fixing the underlying failure mode, you’ll take changes through to production and verify that they make the system better.

You’ll also help build an agentic approach to SRE from the ground up. Our ambition is “hands-free” SRE: agents handle most routine operations, investigation and recovery, bringing in humans when judgment or intervention is needed. You’ll build the tools, execution environment and runbooks that make this possible, progressively expanding what agents can reliably do.

This is an opportunity to shape a new team, establish its engineering practices, and show how a small team can operate a major product with agents doing much of the heavy lifting.

This is the role for you, if you’re excited to work on the things listed below:

 

• Owning operational quality: Define availability, reliability and performance objectives with the engineering teams. Use service-level objectives and error budgets to guide priorities and measure improvements.
• Building observability that drives action: Develop instrumentation, dashboards and actionable alerts that reveal emerging problems early and help explain their impact on users.
• Engineering lasting improvements: Investigate failure modes and make changes to application code, infrastructure and architecture that improve resilience, performance and recoverability.
• Building an agentic SRE platform: Give agents the context and tools to investigate alerts, execute runbooks, take recovery actions and verify outcomes. Engineer clear permissions, audit trails, rollback and escalation into that execution environment.
• Leading incident response: Participate in the on-call rotation as a first responder for New Goodnotes. Coordinate recovery, communicate clearly and involve the right engineers when needed.
• Learning from production: Turn incidents and near misses into improvements to the system, its observability and the agents operating it.
• Reducing operational toil: Replace repetitive manual work with software and automation, increasing the proportion of operations agents can complete successfully.
• Shaping how the team works: Establish production readiness and operational practices alongside engineers across our Global and Shanghai teams, and influence technical decisions through clear reasoning and evidence.

The skills you will need to be successful in the above:

 

• Significant experience in SRE or a similar engineering role, operating production software at scale alongside a large engineering organisation.
• Strong software engineering skills, including the ability to understand unfamiliar application code, diagnose production behaviour, and implement and test changes.
• Hands-on experience designing, operating and troubleshooting production systems on AWS.
• A solid understanding of distributed systems, networking, databases and the failure modes that affect service availability and performance.
• Experience defining reliability objectives and building observability using metrics, logs and traces, with alerts that help teams take meaningful action.
• Experience responding to production incidents, making sound decisions under pressure and following through on improvements.
• Practical use of AI tools in your engineering workflow, and the curiosity and judgment to build toward increasingly autonomous operations.
• A strong sense of ownership and clear communication. You can explain technical trade-offs, bring others along and drive improvements across team boundaries.

 

Even if you don’t meet all the criteria listed above, we would still love to hear from you! Goodnotes places a lot of value on learning and development and will support your growth if needed.

What would be helpful but not required:

• Experience building AI agents, tool integrations or automated investigation and remediation workflows.
• Experience evaluating agent behaviour, testing recovery actions and deciding when automation should escalate to a human.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, particularly Pulumi, and container platforms such as Kubernetes.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse or ClickStack.
• Experience establishing SRE practices or helping build a new team.

The interview process:

• Talent Intro Call: A conversation with our Talent Acquisition team to dive into your experience, what motivates you, and why you're interested in joining Goodnotes.

• Short Technical Pre-screen: with a member of the team.

• AI-assisted take-home challenge: An assignment to complete online on your own time to show your skills using AI.

• Onsite Interview with the following: 
  • Role-Specific Assessment: A technical interview with the team, focused on the core skills for this role. A mix of in-depth knowledge questions and some hands-on challenges.

  • Values-Based Panel Interview: A conversation with 2-3 team members centred on our company values. We'll discuss past experiences to see how your approach aligns with our culture.

• • Hiring Manager Interview: A deeper dive into your professional background, your preferred ways of working, and the specific impact you'll have within the team.

• • AI Literacy: As an AI-first company, we'll meet with one of our AI champions to discuss your curiosity, understanding, and practical use of AI tools in your daily workflow

What's in it for you:

• Customized Growth & Wellness Budgets: We provide dedicated stipends for the things that keep you at your best, including noise-cancelling headphones for deep focus, professional training, personal development, and health and wellness activities.

• Global Connectivity: While we embrace flexible work, we love seeing each other. We provide sponsored visits to our beautiful office locations to foster face-to-face collaboration.

• Company-Wide Offsites: Once a year, we gather the entire global team in person to celebrate our wins, align on our vision, and build lasting connections.

• Comprehensive Health Coverage: Your well-being is our priority. We offer premium medical insurance for you and a dependent to ensure peace of mind for you and your family.

• 4 days in-office hybrid week and 18 remote working days per year: Giving you the freedom to work from a location that suits your life. Whether that's closer to family, while travelling, or simply a change of scenery to refresh your focus.

 

Goodnotes is committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace. We welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences, making all employment decisions based strictly on merit, qualifications, and business needs.

 

Note: Employment is contingent upon successful completion of background checks, including verification of employment, education, and criminal records.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read and understood our Candidate Privacy Notice, which provides important information about the data we collect during the application process. You can find it here.