Sarah
Foster
Senior Site Reliability Engineer — infrastructure, observability, and automation at scale. Currently at Freenome.
Skills
Biography
I'm a Senior Site Reliability Engineer with over a decade of experience spanning infrastructure, observability, and automation. I care deeply about building systems that are resilient, observable, and a joy to operate.
I started my career racking servers in a data center in Ft. Worth and worked my way up through operations, performance engineering, and site reliability. I've been a foundational part of SRE teams at TikTok and Freenome, built observability platforms from scratch, and mentored engineers across multiple organizations.
Past Employers
Helped establish a new SRE team forking from an infrastructure org. Built foundational observability in Datadog, maintained versioned infra in Terraform and Pulumi, and established SRE office hours to drive best practices across the company.
Stood up a new SRE team within a new organization. Interviewed, onboarded, and mentored SREs across multiple teams. Operated large-scale microservices in Kubernetes, built award-winning LLM tooling for code review, and normalized data at scale using commodity AI inferencing.
Orchestrated vendor proofs of concept, certified new data center equipment, and rebuilt firmware deployment infrastructure from scratch. Provided critical vulnerability management and led the Bay Area LGBTQIA+ ERG through COVID.
Planned and coordinated server placement, cabling, networking, and provisioning at web scale. Built automation for metrics, status dashboards, and wildly variable build processes. Bootstrapped multiple employee resource groups.
Brought technical excellence into operations, developed solutions for data integrity across systems, and served as a founding member of a team doing code review, CI/CD, and codified infrastructure.
Recommendations
Sarah and I worked together for 2 years at Facebook. She was an incredible coworker-- besides the obvious technical expertise, she improved our team’s culture exponentially. As a fellow woman in tech, I know the importance of having allies to hold you up and support you. Sarah made me feel comfortable and empowered in a male-dominated field, and any company would be lucky to have her!