Platform Site Reliability Engineer

Specter; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Specter is hiring a Platform Site Reliability Engineer to own the health, reliability, and scalability of the cloud platform behind our connected sensor fleet. You will operate Kubernetes-based infrastructure, manage cloud resources with Terraform, strengthen observability, and support safe deployments across teams.

You’ll collaborate with application, AI, embedded systems, and fleet teams on AWS and Kubernetes.

Qualifications

• Strong Linux systems knowledge and experience diagnosing production systems.
• Hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production, including networking, storage, resource management, upgrades, and troubleshooting.
• Strong experience using Terraform to manage production cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with AWS, including IAM, networking, compute, storage, and EKS.
• Solid networking fundamentals, including DNS, load balancing, firewalls, VPNs, subnets, and routing.

Responsibilities

• Reactive - Triage & Recovery: Debug production issues across Kubernetes clusters, Linux systems, AWS, networking, and workloads; Lead incidents from detection through recovery with cross-team coordination; Participate in on-call rotations and ensure durable fixes.
• Systems Builder - Close the Loop: Build, operate, and improve our Kubernetes platform and AWS infrastructure; Manage production infrastructure with Terraform, including reusable modules, automated validation, and safe change workflows; Reduce toil through automation and improved deployment tooling, CI/CD, and developer workflows.
• Observability Owner - Platform Visibility: Design and improve observability with logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting; Define service-level indicators and close telemetry gaps; Develop runbooks and incident-response procedures.

Skills

Linux

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

Networking

Scripting

Incident management

Tools

Terraform

Job description

Company Background

Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.Soon, we will build robots, trained on top of the data we collect, to take action in these environments as well.Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

The Role

We're hiring a Platform Site Reliability Engineer to own the operational health, reliability, and scalability of the cloud platform behind our connected sensor fleet.This is a high-ownership role at the intersection of site reliability and platform engineering. You'll operate and improve our Kubernetes-based infrastructure, manage cloud resources through Terraform, strengthen observability and incident response, and build the systems that allow our engineering teams to deploy safely and move quickly.You'll work primarily across our AWS infrastructure and Kubernetes environments while partnering with application, AI, embedded systems, and fleet teams. You'll help resolve production issues when they occur-& then improve the platform so they are less likely to happen again.

Responsibilities

• Reactive - Triage & Recovery
  • Debug production issues across Kubernetes clusters, Linux systems, AWS infrastructure, networking, and application workloads.
  • Lead incidents from detection through recovery, coordinating across teams when failures span multiple parts of the system.
  • Participate in an on-call rotation and follow incidents through to durable fixes.
• Systems Builder - Close the Loop
  • Build, operate, and improve our Kubernetes platform and the AWS infrastructure supporting it.
  • Manage production infrastructure with Terraform, including reusable modules, automated validation, and safe change workflows.
  • Reduce operational toil through automation while improving deployment tooling, CI/CD, and developer workflows.
• Observability Owner - Platform Visibility
  • Design and improve observability into system health, functionality, and performance through logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting across Kubernetes workloads and AWS infrastructure.
  • Define meaningful service-level indicators and objectives, and close telemetry gaps before they become incidents.
  • Develop runbooks, incident-response procedures, post-incident reviews, and operational readiness standards.

Qualifications

• Strong Linux systems knowledge and experience diagnosing production systems.
• Hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production, including networking, storage, resource management, upgrades, and troubleshooting.
• Strong experience using Terraform to manage production cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with AWS, including IAM, networking, compute, storage, and EKS.
• Solid networking fundamentals, including DNS, load balancing, firewalls, VPNs, subnets, and routing.
• Experience building operational tooling and automation using Python, Go, Bash, or a similar language.
• Strong ownership during incidents and the ability to turn ambiguous failures into lasting improvements.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting connected devices, edge computing, or on-premises infrastructure alongside cloud systems.
• Experience with CI/CD, GitOps, or Kubernetes multi-cluster environments.
• Familiarity with cloud and Kubernetes security practices.
• Experience reading firmware logs or low-level Rust or C code when debugging across the edge-to-cloud boundary.