Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Nectar Social; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid schedule

Housing stipend

Mobile stipend

Commuter benefits

Free lunch in Palo Alto

Job summary

Nectar Social is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure to own the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of Nectar's production systems. You will work on high-volume data ingestion and real-time AI workloads, establishing foundations teams build on as we scale.

As one of the first dedicated SREs, you will define how we measure, operate, and harden our infrastructure, driving observability, deployment, and incident response.

Qualifications

• 5+ years operating production systems as an SRE or infrastructure engineer.
• Experience scaling databases or production platforms under significant load.
• Hands-on expertise with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Strong programming skills for building automation, tooling, and operational services.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability and scalability of production systems handling growing data and AI workloads.
• Define and drive SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, plus observability and on-call practices.
• Lead incident response and blameless postmortems and implement systemic improvements.
• Improve performance, cost efficiency, and capacity planning across cloud infrastructure as the platform scales.
• Harden infrastructure-as-code, deployment, and CI/CD pipelines for resilience and repeatability.
• Partner with engineering teams to embed reliability into system design and raise the operational bar.

Skills

SRE experience

Cloud experience

Programming for automation

Startup environment

Tools

AWS

Pulumi

Postgres

ClickHouse

Temporal

Job description

About Us

We're living through a fundamental shift in how people discover, evaluate, and purchase products. The next generation doesn't respond to traditional marketing -- they build relationships with brands through authentic social interactions, seek recommendations from communities they trust, and expect personalized experiences that feel human, not corporate.

At Nectar, we're building the AI-native social operating system that enables this new era of commerce. We believe every social interaction should deepen the relationship between brands and their communities while creating genuine value for both sides.

Founded by ex-Meta product and engineering leaders, we've raised over $30M in total capital from investors including GV and True Ventures. We work with brands like Oura Health, Caraway, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Kosas, OLIPOP, and many more. We're building the future of social commerce -- where community, conversation, and commerce converge.

The Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure to own the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of the production systems that power Nectar's platform. We run high-volume data ingestion pipelines and real-time AI agents on top of a fast-growing customer base, and we need a seasoned SRE to help us scale these systems safely and keep them running flawlessly.

As one of our first dedicated SREs, you'll have outsized impact and ownership. You'll define how we measure, operate, and harden our infrastructure -- establishing the reliability foundations that the rest of the engineering team builds on as we scale.

What You'll Be Doing

• Own the reliability and scalability of our production systems as they handle rapidly growing volumes of social data and real-time AI workloads

• Define and drive SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, and build the observability, alerting, and on-call practices to support them

• Lead incident response and blameless postmortems, then turn what we learn into systemic improvements that prevent recurrence

• Improve performance, cost efficiency, and capacity planning across our cloud infrastructure as the platform scales

• Harden our infrastructure-as-code, deployment, and CI/CD pipelines for resilience and repeatability

• Partner with engineering teams to embed reliability into system design and raise the operational bar across the org

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience operating production systems as an SRE, infrastructure, or platform engineer

• Experience scaling databases, data infrastructure, or complex production platforms under significant load

• Hands-on expertise with cloud infrastructure (AWS or similar) and infrastructure-as-code tooling

• Solid programming skills for building automation, tooling, and operational services

• Comfortable operating in fast-moving startup environments with high ownership and autonomy

• A reliability-first mindset balanced with pragmatism about velocity and cost

Bonus Points

• Experience standing up or maturing an SRE practice at an early-stage or rapidly scaling company

• Familiarity with our tech stack: AWS, Pulumi, Postgres, ClickHouse, Turbopuffer, or Temporal

• Background in capacity planning, performance engineering, or cost optimization at scale

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation and early equity

• Health, vision, and dental benefits + 401(k) match

• ClassPass membership for fitness and wellness classes

• Hybrid schedule: 4 days in office, plus 3 remote flex days per quarter (after your first 3 months)

• Comprehensive stipends: $1,000/month housing stipend for living near the office, $50/month mobile stipend, and commuter benefits (train stipend or Palo Alto parking reimbursement)

• Free lunch in the heart of University Ave. in Palo Alto

• Clear career growth opportunities as the company scales