Automation & Tools Engineer

alembic.com; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Alembic is seeking an experienced Senior Automation and Tools Engineer in San Francisco to scale our platform with reliability, observability, and operations at the core. You will partner with engineers and data scientists to build, automate, and maintain infrastructure powering data pipelines, ML workloads, and real-time analytics.

This hands-on role offers visibility across the stack and an opportunity to shape infrastructure and operations.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in Tools, SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering.
• Proficient with IaC: Ansible, Helm, Kustomize.
• Strong Python or Go programming skills.
• Deep containerization with Docker and Kubernetes; Linux networking basics.
• Experience with monitoring stacks and CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Automate and control datacenter and cloud infrastructure focusing on build and deployment systems.
• Improve reliability and performance through automation and observability.
• Create and configure datacenter provisioning and configuration management tools.
• Enhance developer experience with self-service tooling.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, incident response (SLOs, runbooks).
• Collaborate with engineering and data science to drive reliability.
• Ensure security, compliance, and operational readiness across infrastructure.
• Drive post-incident analysis and continuous improvement.

Skills

Ansible

Helm/Kustomize

Python/Go

Docker

Kubernetes

Linux/Networking

CI/CD

Observability

SRE/DevOps

Communication

Tools

GitHub Actions

ArgoCD

Datadog

ELK

OpenTelemetry

Job description

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're looking for an experienced Senior Automation and Tools Engineer to help us scale our platform with reliability, observability, and operational excellence at the core. You'll partner with engineers and data scientists to build, automate, and maintain the infrastructure that powers our core platform- including data pipelines, ML workloads, and real-time analytics systems.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role with visibility across the stack and the opportunity to shape the future of our infrastructure and operations.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Work closely with SREs and developers to automate and control datacenter and cloud-based infrastructure, with a focus on build and deployment systems, as well as configuration management
• Improve system reliability and performance through automation, observability, and proactive capacity planning
• Create and configure tools for datacenter provisioning, configuration management, observability using standard and custom tools
• Improve developer experience by providing tools for self-service
• Implement and maintain monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes (SLOs, runbooks, on-call rotations)
• Collaborate across engineering and data science teams to drive a culture of performance and reliability
• Ensure security, compliance, and operational readiness across our physical and cloud infrastructure
• Drive post-incident analysis and continuous improvement initiatives

MUST-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of experience in Tools development, SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering roles
• Good programming skills with IaC (infrastructure as code) languages such as Ansible, Helm, Kustomize
• Good programming skills with general-purpose languages such as Python or Go
• Deep experience with containerization (Docker) and Kubernetes
• Strong knowledge of Linux systems and networking fundamentals
• Experience with monitoring and observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, OpenTelemetry)
• Proficiency with CI/CD tools and pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, etc.)
• Ability to debug complex systems and automate solutions in scripting languages (Python, Bash, etc.)
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work cross-functionally

NICE-TO-HAVE

• Familiarity with build configuration tools, software dependency management and C++
• Experience with datacenter automation such as system imaging and configuration management
• Experience supporting data-intensive platforms (Spark, Airflow, Kafka, etc.)
• Familiarity with security practices for cloud-native applications and infrastructure
• Experience in high-compliance or SOC-2 environments

WHAT YOU'LL GET

• Ownership of mission-critical infrastructure in a company solving real-world enterprise problems
• A front-row seat to a high-performance engineering culture
• The ability to influence how our platform scales-from deployment to incident management
• An environment that values curiosity, accountability, and impact