Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Core Cloud Platform Software

Front Door Defense; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 356,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision coverage

401k Plan with company match

Flexible paid time off

Wellness and commuter stipends

Job summary

Lambda's Core Cloud Platform powers compute provisioning and infrastructure orchestration across our data centers. We are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to improve reliability, scalability, and operational maturity of these systems as the fleet and customer base grow.

You will work across Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, observability, deployment systems, and incident response to build a resilient foundation for customer AI workloads.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in site reliability, infra, or production software.
• Deep Kubernetes production experience.
• Experience with physical data centers, private/hybrid cloud.
• Proficient with Terraform and IaC tooling.
• CI/CD/GitOps with Argo CD/Flux/Helm/Kustomize.
• Observability with OpenTelemetry/Prometheus/Grafana/Datadog.
• Go or Python production tooling.

Responsibilities

• Operate and scale critical platform services across Lambda's data centers.
• Improve reliability of compute provisioning, instance lifecycle, and regional orchestration.
• Build monitoring, alerting, and tracing for service health and provisioning latency.
• Define SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and operational readiness standards.
• Automate detection and remediation of configuration drift and failed workflows.
• Build safe deployment, rollback, and disaster-recovery using IaC and GitOps.
• Lead production incident response, postmortems, and durable corrective actions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the reliability bar across the org.

Skills

Kubernetes in production

Terraform

GitOps (Argo CD/Flux)

Observability (OpenTelemetry/Prom

Go/Python tooling

SLIs/SLOs management

Incident response leadership

Tools

Argo CD

Flux

Helm

Kustomize

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Job description

Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Core Cloud Platform

Lead reliability improvements and automate platform infrastructure across multi-data-center cloud environment

Location: San Francisco, California Bellevue, Washington San Jose, California

Compensation: $240,000 - 356,000 USD / year

About The Role

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Lambda's Core Cloud Platform powers compute provisioning and infrastructure orchestration across our physical data centers. We are looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to improve the reliability, scalability, and operational maturity of these systems as Lambda's fleet and customer base grow.

You will work across Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, observability, deployment systems, and incident response to build a resilient foundation for customer AI workloads.

What You'll Do

• Operate and scale critical platform services across Lambda's data centers.
• Improve the reliability of compute provisioning, Instance lifecycle, and regional orchestration systems.
• Build monitoring, alerting, and tracing for service health, provisioning latency, and customer-impacting failures.
• Define SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and operational readiness standards.
• Automate detection and remediation of configuration drift, failed workflows, and orphaned resources.
• Build safe deployment, rollback, and disaster recovery workflows using infrastructure as code and GitOps.
• Design fault-isolation mechanisms that reduce blast radius and prevent cascading failures.
• Lead production incident response, postmortems, and durable corrective actions.
• Partner with Compute, Networking, Storage, Security, and Support teams.
• Participate in on-call and improve its sustainability through automation and better tooling.
• Mentor engineers and raise the reliability bar across the organization.

You

• Have 7+ years of experience in site reliability, infrastructure, distributed systems, or production software engineering.
• Have deep experience operating Kubernetes in production.
• Understand Kubernetes architecture, scheduling, networking, resource management, upgrades, and common failure modes.
• Have experience with physical data centers, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or environments without full reliance on managed services.
• Are proficient with Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Have built CI/CD or GitOps workflows using tools such as Argo CD, Flux, Helm, or Kustomize.
• Have experience with observability platforms such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.
• Can build production-quality tooling in Go, Python, or a similar language.
• Understand distributed systems concepts including consistency, retries, idempotency, backpressure, and partial failure.
• Have experience defining and operating against SLIs and SLOs.
• Can lead effectively during high-severity incidents.
• Approach recurring operational issues as engineering and automation problems.
• Communicate clearly and work effectively across teams.
• Bring strong ownership, sound judgment, and low ego.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AI infrastructure, GPU platforms, or high-performance computing.
• Experience operating distributed systems across multiple regions or data centers.
• Experience with Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, admission control, or scheduler extensions.
• Experience with etcd performance, backup, restore, or disaster recovery.
• Experience with Linux systems, container runtimes, cgroups, storage, or networking.
• Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or automated remediation.
• Experience with Kubernetes RBAC, OIDC, workload identity, or certificate management.
• Familiarity with SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar compliance frameworks.

Salary Range Information

The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description.

About Lambda

• Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast
• Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove
• We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG
• Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers
• We offer generous cash & equity compensation
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles
• 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees)
• Flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use

Equal Opportunity Employer

Lambda is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.