Senior Site Reliability Engineer -AI Infrastructure Operations

Nscale; Houston, San Francisco, Seattle (TX, CA, WA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Ownership from start

Flexible schedule

Job summary

Nscale is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to own the reliability bar for AI infrastructure operations. You will tackle the hardest reliability challenges, mentor peers, and shape SRE practices across the platform.

You will work closely with teams running AI workloads and GPU cloud infrastructure, ensuring high availability and scalable performance while maintaining a practical on-call model.

Qualifications

• 6-10 years of SRE, systems or software eng with ownership of production at scale.
• Strong software engineering skills and ability to build reusable tools.
• Deep knowledge of Linux, networking and distributed systems; practical incident experience.

Responsibilities

• Own reliability for critical production services end to end and set direction.
• Mentor SREs through design reviews and incident debriefs; raise the bar.
• Define SLO framework, incident processes, and on-call practices for sustainability.
• Participate in design reviews to bake reliability in from the start.
• Lead the hardest incidents and derive improvements to prevent recurrence.
• Build tooling and automation to reduce toil for the team.

Skills

Python

Go

Linux

Distributed systems

Tools

Kubernetes

Cloud & virtualization

Job description

Senior Site Reliability Engineer -AI Infrastructure Operations

Locations: Houston; San Francisco; Seattle

About Nscale

Nscale is the GPU cloud built for AI. We run high-performance, cost-efficient infrastructure for AI-native startups and global enterprises, from bare metal up through the platform services teams actually build on. Our culture runs on ownership, accountability, and speed. We move with urgency, we tell each other the truth, and everyone here stays close to the infrastructure that makes AI work.

The Role

This is a senior SRE role for someone who sets the reliability bar and then pulls the rest of the team up to it. You'll own the hardest problems on the platform: the automation other engineers build on, the services that can't go down, and the design decisions that determine whether either holds up at scale. You'll still carry a pager, but the real job is making sure it fires less, for everyone, over time.

What You'll Do

• Own reliability for critical production services end to end; set the direction, not just respond to what breaks.
• Grow the team, not just the systems; mentor other SREs through design review, pairing, and incident debriefs, and hold the bar that pulls everyone up to it.
• Set the standards the rest of the team works to: the SLO framework, the incident process, and the on-call practices that keep it sustainable.
• Get in early on design reviews and architecture decisions, so reliability is built in rather than bolted on after the first outage.
• Lead the hardest incidents and the root causes nobody else can crack; turn each one into a change that keeps it from coming back.
• Build the tooling and automation that removes toil for the whole team, not just your own surface area.

What You'll Bring

• 6-10 years in SRE, systems engineering, or software engineering, with real ownership of production at scale in a data center or cloud environment.
• Strong software engineering skills (Python, Go, or similar); you build tools other engineers adopt, not scripts that run once and rot.
• Deep command of Linux, networking, and distributed systems, plus the judgment to know where the real failure modes hide.
• Hands‑on with Kubernetes and virtualized or bare‑metal environments; comfortable close to the metal, not just the cloud console.
• Experience running AI or GPU workloads, or high-performance computing (HPC); if not, the depth to get there fast.
• Reliability practices you put in place that outlasted you: SLOs, observability and alerting at scale, incident process, on‑call that people can actually live with.
• A track record as the senior voice in incidents and design reviews, trusted to make the call under pressure.
• A habit of raising the people around you without being asked to.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with high-performance networking (InfiniBand, RDMA).

On-Call and Pace

A quick note on the shape of the job. This role sits close to production, so there is an on-call rotation, and some weeks are busier than others. As a senior on the team, you help set how that rotation runs and, more to the point, how we make it lighter over time. We share the load fairly, and we treat every page as a signal worth acting on rather than just an interruption. The goal is to leave the systems quieter than you found them, so each rotation asks less of the person carrying it. If that's the kind of ownership you're drawn to, you'll do well here.

What We Offer

• Competitive base plus equity, reviewed every 12 months.
• Real ownership from the start, and a direct hand in how reliability works across the platform.
• Flexibility that treats you as an adult; we care that the work gets done and we trust you to shape your day.

Salary Range

$170,000 - $265,000 USD. Actual compensation varies with skill set, experience, and location, and the role may be eligible for bonus and equity.

At Nscale, we are committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse, and equitable workplace. We believe that a variety of perspectives enrich our work environment, and we encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, experiences, and abilities. We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio‑economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

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