Lead Tech SRE

Kestra; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Kestra is seeking a Lead Tech SRE for Kestra Cloud to own end-to-end architecture, deliver the platform on GCP, and lead a small team of SREs.

You will write specs, set standards for Terraform modules, Helm charts, and GitOps, and drive automation for provisioning, upgrades, backups, and decommissioning.

This hands-on leadership role requires staying hands-on with Terraform and Kubernetes while guiding the technical direction with the CTO and security engineer.

Qualifications

• Experience leading SRE teams and delivering cloud platforms.
• Strong skills in Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitOps.
• Proven ability to write design docs and RFCs.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture specs for Kestra Cloud on GCP.
• Define SLOs, error budgets, and prioritization.
• Deliver Terraform modules, Helm charts, and GitOps patterns.
• Automate provisioning, upgrades, backups, migrations.
• Lead a three-person team and collaborate with CTO and security engineer.

Skills

Terraform

Kubernetes

GitOps

ArgoCD

Cloud architecture

Incident management

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

Helm

GitHub Actions

Prometheus/Grafana

GCP

Job description

About Kestra

Kestra is the universal orchestration platform: open source, declarative, and designed to orchestrate data pipelines, IT automation, business workflows, and AI/agentic systems. Trusted by over 10,000 organizations worldwide, including JPMorgan Chase, Bloomberg, FILA, and Crédit Agricole, Kestra orchestrates mission-critical workloads at scale. The open-source project has close to 30,000 GitHub stars, hundreds of contributors, and a fast-growing global community.

About the role

Kestra Cloud is our fully managed SaaS edition of Kestra. Each customer gets a dedicated Kestra instance on dedicated infrastructure, so the platform is a fleet of isolated stacks rather than one shared cluster. It is in Beta today, running production workloads for early customers, with General Availability planned for 2027. Each instance runs arbitrary user code (scripts, containers, queries against their own systems) through hundreds of plugins, and the fleet grows with every new customer. Provisioning, upgrading, and observing dozens to hundreds of identical stacks without drift is the core problem. We're looking for a Lead Tech SRE to own Kestra Cloud end to end: the architecture and specs, the delivery, the monitoring, and the continuous improvement of the platform. You decide how the platform should evolve, write it down, split it into work, and ship it with your team. You would lead a team of three, yourself included. That means you stay hands-on (a large share of your week is Terraform, Kubernetes manifests, and incident work) while setting the technical direction, reviewing designs, and dispatching work to two SREs. You work closely with the CTO, the platform engineering teams building the Kestra core, and our security engineer. This is an engineering leadership role, not a people-management-only one.

What you would do

Architecture specsOwn the target architecture of Kestra Cloud on GCP: the per-customer dedicated stack (cluster, network, databases, queues), how it is templated and versioned, regions, and the path from Beta to GA.Write the specs (design docs, RFCs, ADRs) that turn product needs into infrastructure work, and defend the trade-offs: cost per customer vs isolation level, GCP project vs cluster vs node pool per customer, managed service vs self-run.Define SLOs and error budgets per service and per tier, and make them the basis for prioritization.DeliveryBreak specs into work and dispatch it across the team, then review and unblock. You set the bar for Terraform modules, Helm charts, and GitOps conventions.Automate the customer instance lifecycle: provisioning, upgrades, scaling, backups, migration, and decommissioning, with no manual steps.Own the release path of Kestra Cloud with ArgoCD and GitHub Actions: progressive rollouts, rollback, and upgrade safety across the whole fleet of customer instances.Monitoring operationsBuild the observability stack (metrics, logs, traces, alerting) so that issues are caught before customers report them.Run on