Senior Platform / Build Engineer, NIX

Revel; San Francisco, Los Angeles (CA, CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

High ownership in engineering projects

Opportunity to shape platform future

Work on challenging real-world systems

Job summary

Revel is seeking a Senior Software Reliability Engineer in San Francisco to enhance their deployment tooling for zero-downtime releases. You will design and maintain CI pipelines, focus on Nix-based systems, and support high-consequence software delivery.

Applicants should have over 5 years in software reliability engineering, with hands-on experience in Nix systems and managing CI/CD infrastructure. Revel offers opportunities to solve complex data challenges and work on systems critical to real-world applications.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software reliability engineering or CI/CD infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with a Nix-based build system.
• Experience delivering software for large-scale systems.
• Proven skills in managing CI systems and resource allocation.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain CI and deployment pipelines.
• Optimize CI compute pool and manage resource allocation.
• Partner with leadership on hardware capacity planning.
• Support customer-facing production systems with rigor.

Skills

Building internal developer platforms

Nix-based build systems

Zero-downtime deployment

High-consequence systems management

CI system optimization

Infrastructure-as-code

Cloud infrastructure management

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

AWS

Nix

Job description

This position is based in either Marina Del Rey (LA) or San Francisco onsite. We are open to connecting with local candidates and those open to relocation.

About Revel

Revel is building the software infrastructure that controls the world’s most critical hardware systems—across aerospace, energy, robotics, defense, and advanced manufacturing.

Our platform replaces outdated tooling with a modern, high-performance stack for commanding, monitoring, and deploying real-world systems. Engineers rely on Revel to operate hardware where safety, speed, reliability, and clarity matter.

As we scale, we are tackling complex data challenges around ingesting and analyzing large volumes of high-frequency, high-cardinality telemetry.

Role Overview

Revel's engineering team has rebuilt its software build system on Nix and is just getting started. We're extending that investment into NixOS and a broader Nix-based deployment and CI platform. As we scale, our platform growth depends on efficient, reliable, and high-signal testing and verification strategy that leverages a large compute pool, and our deployment tooling is one of the most important problems left to solve in order to keep shipping reliably as the team grows. Revel will deploy workloads into the cloud as well as on-premise installations embedded within customer networks across the globe.

We're looking for a Senior Software Reliability Engineer (Nix) to join our Software Platform team and help us ship code into production with zero-downtime deployments, while keeping engineers fast and productive in the meantime. You'll work alongside our existing Nix lead and the broader platform team on the build, test, CI, and deployment pipeline end-to-end. You'll have real influence over how we manage and scale our compute infrastructure as demand grows.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain Nix-Native CI and deployment pipelines that take code from commit to production with zero-downtime deploys
• Maintain and improve our internal package set in order to enable software distribution across the company and to our customers and drive adoption of NixOS across our infrastructure
• Own and optimize our CI compute pool — improve pipeline throughput, identify and resolve bottlenecks, and manage resource allocation across a growing, compute-intensive test and verification workload
• Partner with engineering leadership on hardware capacity planning and infrastructure procurement as compute needs scale
• Improve developer ergonomics around Nix — tooling, documentation, standards, and workflows that keep engineers productive
• Define and evolve our deployment strategy, including how software is delivered to customers across multiple regions/markets
• Operate and support high-consequence, customer-facing production systems with rigor and care
• Provide mentorship and Nix expertise to the broader engineering org as the platform team grows

Must have experience

• 5+ years building internal developer platforms, build systems, or CI/CD infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with a Nix-based build system or comparable for a real product with real customers
• Proven experience delivering software reliably for a live system with a large user base, including zero-downtime deployment practices
• Experience managing high-consequence systems where reliability and correctness directly impact customers
• Experience owning and optimizing a large CI system and compute pool — resource management, pipeline performance, and bottleneck analysis
• Deep understanding of how build systems and packaging ecosystems work (Nix, Nixpkgs, NixOS, or comparable systems such as Bazel)
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tooling (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Salt)
• Experience managing and owning cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure) or on-premise hardware systems
• Able to take a vaguely-defined infrastructure problem, break it down, and ship a solution

Nice to have

• Experience with NixOS in production (not just Nix for builds/packaging)
• Experience with Bazel or other large-scale build systems
• Experience with globally distributed deployment and the operational challenges that come with it
• Experience with hardware/compute procurement and capacity planning
• Experience scaling platform infrastructure at a fast-growing startup
• Experience with FedRAMP, ITAR, SOX, or other relevant security/compliance frameworks
• Knowledge of the Nix packaging ecosystem and/or the NixOS module system
• Familiarity with the build tooling behind one of Revel's core language stacks — e.g., CMake/pkg-config (C++), Cargo/Rustc (Rust), Go, Vite (TypeScript), or setuptools/uv/hatchling (Python)
• Linux fundamentals: kernel and kernel modules, Kconfig, systemd, Secure Boot, and system hardening
• Experience with Linux on embedded targets

Why Revel

• Work on systems that support real-world hardware operations
• Tackle challenging problems in large-scale data infrastructure
• High ownership and impact within a fast-moving engineering team
• Opportunity to help shape the future of our platform

ITAR Requirements

• To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicants must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful permanent resident (green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.