Expert: Interactive Coding, Site Reliability Engineering (Contract, Remote)

Patronus AI; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 243,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote

Internationally oriented

Paid trial

Flexible hours

Job summary

Patronus AI is seeking an experienced site reliability/production engineer for a fully remote engagement. You will handle production-like reliability tasks in sandboxed environments, explain decisions, and document outcomes after each scenario.

The role requires live sessions overlap with US/Europe hours; approximately 10 hours per week for initial 1–3 months, at $150/hour with a paid trial. This contractor position is remote and international.

Qualifications

• Experience in site reliability, production engineering, or platform operations.
• Hands-on experience with orchestration, monitoring, infrastructure as code, or deployment pipelines.
• Good incident judgment and risk-aware decision making.
• Strong verbal communication and concise post-incident writing.

Responsibilities

• Triage alerts and investigate system behavior using metrics, logs, and traces.
• Diagnose root causes and apply mitigations, rollbacks, or fixes.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and delivery tooling teams.
• Explain decisions during live sessions and flag unsafe approaches.
• Document investigations and resolutions after each scenario.

Skills

Site reliability

Operations tooling

Incident judgment

Live-session communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Helm

Terraform

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Role overview

Work through production-style reliability and infrastructure problems in a sandboxed environment, using the judgment expected during real operations. In live screen-share sessions, you’ll investigate symptoms, mitigate or fix issues, explain your reasoning, and point out where a scenario does not reflect operational reality. The resulting work helps define reliable AI performance on site reliability engineering tasks; prior AI experience is not required.

Responsibilities

• Triage operational alerts and investigate system behavior using metrics, logs, and traces.
• Diagnose root causes and choose appropriate mitigations, rollbacks, or fixes.
• Work with infrastructure and delivery tooling such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, Helm, Terraform, and CI/CD systems.
• Explain decisions during shared-screen sessions and identify unsafe or misleading approaches.
• Write a brief account of the investigation and resolution after each scenario.

Requirements

• Professional experience in site reliability, production engineering, platform operations, or infrastructure.
• Practical experience with the systems and tools relevant to your specialty, such as orchestration, monitoring, infrastructure as code, or deployment pipelines.
• Sound incident judgment: ability to investigate evidence before changing configuration and to weigh the risks of potential fixes.
• Clear verbal reasoning during live work and concise written communication afterward.
• Availability for live sessions with a few hours of overlap with US or European working hours.

Nice to have

• Experience on a production on-call rotation, including incident response and post-incident reviews.
• Experience writing runbooks, post-mortems, service-level objectives, or incident training materials.
• Familiarity with failure modes of AI coding agents in operations work.

Benefits and work setup

• Independent contractor engagement, fully remote and open internationally.
• Approximately 10 hours per week for an initial one to three months, with possible extension.
• Pay is $150 per hour; the trial session is paid.
• Selection includes a short interview and resume review, followed by a paid trial scored against a quality checklist.
• Work must be original and human-authored. Use fictional scenarios and do not share confidential configurations, runbooks, incident details, or other protected material.