Senior SRE: AI Infrastructure & GPU Clusters

SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP; Hawthorne (CA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Long-term cash awards

Medical, vision, dental coverage

401(k) retirement plan

Paid parental leave

Paid vacation

Paid holidays

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP in Hawthorne, CA is seeking a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer for Starshield. You will design, operate, and scale GPU and AI infrastructure, automation, and on‑premise Kubernetes clusters to support critical national security missions.

You will mentor juniors, lead technical excellence, collaborate with AI teams, and address reliability, performance, and security requirements. A Top Secret/DOE clearance is preferred, with travel and extended hours as needed.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems/IT, or an engineering discipline and 5+ years of professional experience with Linux operating systems; OR 7+ years of professional experience in software, DevOps, or site reliability engineering in lieu of a degree
• 5+ year of experience with Kubernetes
• 5+ year of experience managing Linux operating systems
• Experience with Terraform, Ansible, or other infrastructure tools
• Experience with containerization technologies (i.e. OCI containers, Kubernetes)
• Experience scripting in Bash, Python, or other similar languages
• Development experience in Python, C++, or Go
• 5+ years of experience with Python and Python-based development frameworks
• Experience managing Kubernetes clusters, not just using them
• Knowledge of Linux boot process and systems configuration
• Deep understanding of testing, continuous integration, build, deployment & continuous monitoring
• Understanding of relevant build technologies, such as Bazel and Makefiles
• Focus on performance bottlenecks and performance improvement techniques
• Understanding of distributed databases and data modeling
• Experience with automatically managing thousands of servers (eg: Terraform or Ansible)
• Strong networking knowledge of TCP/IP
• Cloud virtualization experience

Responsibilities

• Manage and provide support for GPU as a service for external customers on bare metal hardware and virtualized platforms
• Design, validate, and productize solutions for AI clusters (100k+ GPU scale)
• Develop automation to deploy and manage on-premise Kubernetes/AI clusters, and operating systems
• Deploy and manage core infrastructure such as databases, monitoring and distributed storage
• Closely collaborate with AI engineers to create highly scalable, operable, and maintainable products
• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services -- from inception and design, through deployment, operation and refinement
• Monitoring and alerting supporting systems to have high availability
• Identify areas for improvement and create innovative solutions that enable high system availability
• Mentor and train junior engineers
• As a senior engineer you must lead the team to technical excellence – your decisions guide the team

Skills

Kubernetes

Linux

Terraform

Ansible

Python

Go

C++

Bash

GTX/GPUs

Networking TCP/IP

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/IT/Engineering

Tools

OCI containers

Kubernetes clusters management

CI/CD tooling

Job description

SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP in Hawthorne, CA is seeking a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer for Starshield. You will design, operate, and scale GPU and AI infrastructure, automation, and on‑premise Kubernetes clusters to support critical national security missions.

You will mentor juniors, lead technical excellence, collaborate with AI teams, and address reliability, performance, and security requirements. A Top Secret/DOE clearance is preferred, with travel and extended hours as needed.