How to apply for Systems Reliability Engineer

About Local Public, a Public Benefit Corporation

Local Public is a Public Benefit Corporation, meaning it's legally committed to balancing profit with positive social impact—likely in the local news and media space. This role offers a chance to work on a streaming platform that serves audiences across the US and Canada, ensuring reliable access to local journalism and content. The remote-first culture with flexible hours (afternoon/evening) suggests a trust-based environment focused on viewer demand.

About the role

As a Systems Reliability Engineer, you'll be the bridge between development and operations, ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of a multi-cloud streaming infrastructure. You'll work with AWS (ECS, CloudFront, Aurora Serverless) and GCP (Cloud Functions, Firebase) to support containerized workloads and serverless backends. Your work directly impacts constant uptime for streaming audiences, making you critical to the company's mission of delivering local content reliably.

A typical day

Your day might start in the afternoon with a stand-up meeting to review overnight incidents and upcoming deployments. You'll spend time optimizing CloudFront distributions, troubleshooting Aurora Serverless performance, and deploying updates via Terraform and FlightControl. In the evening, you'll monitor streaming traffic during peak viewer hours, ready to respond to any reliability issues that arise.

Who Local Public, a Public Benefit Corporation is looking for

• Proven experience managing multi-cloud environments (AWS and GCP) with specific tools like ECS, CloudFront, Aurora Serverless, Cloud Functions, and Firebase.
• Strong background in containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Experience with deployment tools like FlightControl and Firebase, and a proactive mindset to bridge dev and ops.
• Comfortable working afternoon/evening hours to align with streaming operations and viewer patterns, and excellent at remote collaboration.

Tips for this application

• Highlight specific experience with AWS ECS, CloudFront, Aurora Serverless, GCP Cloud Functions, and Firebase in your resume—these are the exact technologies they use.
• Emphasize any past work in streaming or media infrastructure, as reliability for live/video content is a key differentiator.
• Show familiarity with FlightControl (a deployment tool for Laravel) if you have it; otherwise, mention similar deployment automation tools.
• Address your ability to work afternoon/evening hours explicitly in your cover letter or application to show alignment with their operational needs.
• Demonstrate a proactive approach to SRE—include metrics or examples of how you improved uptime, reduced latency, or automated deployments in previous roles.

What to cover in your cover letter

['Your hands-on experience with multi-cloud architectures (AWS and GCP) and specific services like ECS, CloudFront, and Cloud Functions.', "Your understanding of streaming infrastructure reliability challenges and how you've ensured high availability for media audiences.", 'Your proficiency with Terraform and other IaC tools to manage scalable, repeatable deployments.', "Your enthusiasm for Local Public's mission as a Public Benefit Corporation and how you align with their social impact goals."]

Research before applying

• Explore Local Public's website and any public materials to understand their mission as a Public Benefit Corporation and their streaming products.
• Research the specific technologies mentioned: AWS ECS, CloudFront, Aurora Serverless, GCP Cloud Functions, Firebase, and FlightControl. Understand how they integrate in a streaming context.
• Look into the challenges of multi-cloud streaming infrastructure, such as data transfer costs, latency, and failover strategies.
• Investigate the company's audience (US and Canada) and how local content might influence infrastructure needs, such as regional compliance or content delivery networks.

Likely interview topics

Based on the job description, expect questions about:

• How would you design a multi-cloud architecture for a streaming service to ensure high availability and low latency?
• Describe your experience with AWS ECS and GCP Cloud Functions. How do you manage containerized workloads across both?
• What strategies do you use for monitoring and incident response in a streaming environment with constant uptime requirements?
• How do you approach infrastructure as code with Terraform to maintain consistency across multiple cloud providers?
• Can you walk us through a time you improved reliability or performance for a high-traffic application? What metrics did you use?

Common mistakes to avoid

• Applying without demonstrating specific experience in multi-cloud environments—generic cloud experience won't cut it here.
• Ignoring the afternoon/evening work schedule; if you can't accommodate it, you're not a fit.
• Submitting a generic cover letter that doesn't mention Local Public's Public Benefit Corporation status or streaming focus, showing a lack of research.