Site Reliability Engineer III - AI-Centric Application Performance & FinOps

About the Team

At Wayfair, our FinOps and Technology Cost Value Management (TCVM) team is redefining how enterprise tech organizations optimize cloud and AI investments. We dont just audit cloud bills-we engineer systems that embed cost, performance, and reliability intelligence directly into developer workflows.

By combining automation, open-source telemetry, and agentic AI developer tools (such as Devin and Cursor), we make cost optimization safe, autonomous, and grounded in real-world application behavior. In this role, you will bridge site reliability engineering, performance profiling, and cloud economics across Wayfair's multi-million dollar Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and AI/SaaS footprint.

What You'll Do

1. Architectural Telemetry & Dependency Profiling

• Map complex application code paths, middleware, microservices, and database workloads (e.g., GKE, BigQuery) to their underlying infrastructure costs and Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
• Leverage APM, profiling, and OpenTelemetry to establish baseline performance metrics (latency, throughput, error rates) before and after optimization changes.
• Collaborate with application architects and platform engineering teams to maintain dependency graphs and ownership matrices for high-cost services.

2. Agentic AI Playbook Validation & Co-Engineering

• Partner with AI SDLC platforms leaders, ML/AI platforms leaders, and named wayfair engineering leaders using AI SDLC operations to evaluate, refine, and validate automated pull requests (PRs) and optimization playbooks generated by Devin, Cursor, and custom AI agents.
• Build the tooling and process to conduct initial sandbox resource advisory testing against application SLO's, and middleware/code/infra advisories to ensure no collisions exist and advisory is proven safe to recommend to engineer workload owners.
• Agents and Judge/Classifiers and nightly self reflection and self improvement for reviewing AI-suggested code, query optimizations, and infrastructure configurations to prevent performance regressions, memory leaks, or reliability hazards.

3. Safe Delivery, Guardrails & Rollout Strategy

• Shift FinOps optimization left by building SLO-aware policy checks, CI/CD guardrails, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) linting rules (Terraform, Helm).
• Design safe deployment patterns including automated canary analysis, pre-merge checks, staged rollouts, and automated rollback triggers for cost-saving changes.
• Investigate performance regressions or unexpected cloud spending anomalies, leading root-cause analyses (RCAs) to harden optimization workflows.

4. FinOps & Performance Value Measurement

• Define metrics that measure cost-efficiency gains relative to application throughput and reliability.
• Instrument automated reporting that tracks developer adoption, realized GCP/SaaS cost savings, and SLO stability across service domains.

What You Bring

• Core Experience: 5+ years in SRE, Production Engineering, Systems/Performance Engineering, or Software Engineering managing scale production environments.
• GCP & Cloud-Native Expertise: Deep hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), specifically GKE (Kubernetes), BigQuery, and cloud resource tuning.
• Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD: Proficiency with Terraform, Helm, and automated deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions, Buildkite, Jenkins).
• Observability & Profiling: Direct experience with APM, continuous profiling, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Dynatrace, Google Cloud Ops), and defining meaningful SLOs/SLIs.
• Automation & Scripting: Strong coding skills in Python, Go, or Bash for automating operational tasks, telemetry parsing, and custom API integrations.
• AI Tool Fluency: Practical exposure to or active usage of AI coding assistants (Cursor, Devin, GitHub Copilot) with a critical engineering mindset toward validating AI-generated code.
• FinOps Fundamentals: Understanding of cloud cost drivers, resource allocation, compute optimization, and balancing cost against system availability.

Key Skills & Live Interview Evaluation Focus

Candidates for this role will be evaluated across four technical dimensions during the live interview process. The table below outlines how job requirements map directly to interview stages:

Interview Module

Tested Technical Domain

Key Concepts & Tools Evaluated

System Architecture & Dependency Mapping

Production Systems & Profiling

Architectural trade-offs, bottleneck identification, tracing distributed requests across GKE and BigQuery, setting SLIs/SLOs.

Live Automation & Coding

Scripting & Tooling

Writing Python/Go scripts to parse telemetry data, automate API interactions, or construct CI/CD guardrail checks.

AI-Agentic Playbook & Code Review

Code Quality & Validation

Reviewing AI-generated PRs (Devin/Cursor style), identifying unsafe resource changes, memory/latency regressions, and IaC flaws.

FinOps Trade-off & Scenario Analysis

Cloud Economics & SRE Safety

Designing canary analysis pipelines, handling latency vs. cost trade-offs, implementing automated rollbacks, and capacity planning.

Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities

Wayfair is fully committed to providing equal opportunities for all individuals, including individuals with disabilities. As part of this commitment, Wayfair will make reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of qualified individuals with disabilities, unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on business operations. If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, please let us know by completing our Accomodations for Applicants form.

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About Wayfair Inc.

Wayfair is one of the world's largest online destinations for the home. Whether you work in our global headquarters in Boston, or in our warehouses or offices throughout the world, we're reinventing the way people shop for their homes. Through our commitment to industry-leading technology and creative problem-solving, we are confident that Wayfair will be home to the most rewarding work of your career. If you're looking for rapid growth, constant learning, and dynamic challenges, then you'll find that amazing career opportunities are knocking.

No matter who you are, Wayfair is a place you can call home. We're a community of innovators, risk-takers, and trailblazers who celebrate our differences, and know that our unique perspectives make us stronger, smarter, and well-positioned for success. We value and rely on the collective voices of our employees, customers, community, and suppliers to help guide us as we build a better Wayfair - and world - for all. Every voice, every perspective matters. That's why we're proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristic.

Your personal data is processed in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Notice (https://www.wayfair.com/careers/privacy). If you have any questions or wish to exercise your rights under applicable privacy and data protection laws, please contact us at dataprotectionofficer@wayfair.com.