Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Blue Sky; Northern (KY); Remote; USD 200,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Bluesky is seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to design, implement, and operate the infrastructure powering AT Protocol. This hands-on role focuses on high-scale production systems, reliability, observability, and automation.

The position is fully remote with overlap with Pacific Time and occasional travel for team meetups. Base salary ranges from $200,000 to $270,000 per year, with equity considered in total compensation.

Qualifications

• 10+ years' experience operating high-scale production systems, including bare metal.
• Strong Linux, networking, storage, and databases fundamentals.
• Experience building/operating latency-sensitive, highly available systems.
• Proficient in writing production-quality Go code.
• Familiar with observability, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Hands-on with Kubernetes and production automation.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate Bluesky AT Protocol infrastructure.
• Own reliability, availability, and operational excellence for production systems.
• Improve production readiness and manage migrations.
• Develop software improving performance, automation, and observability.
• Scale systems on bare-metal and cloud environments.
• Lead incident reviews and drive engineering improvements.
• Perform capacity planning and cost management.
• Mentor engineers in reliability practices and culture.

Skills

10+ years experience

Linux fundamentals

Networking fundamentals

Distributed systems

Go production software

Observability

Incident response

Tools

Kubernetes

Automation tooling

Job description

Engineering Remote (overlap with PST) Full-time

Bluesky's mission is to transition the social web from platforms to protocols. We're building a federated social network called AT Protocol where users have more power. Our small team has decades of combined experience building distributed applications.

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to help design, implement, and operate the infrastructure that powers Bluesky and atproto. This is a hands‑on role for someone who has operated high-scale production systems, understands how distributed systems fail, and wants to build the operational foundation for an open social network.

Key Responsibilities

• You'll work across bare-metal systems, cloud services, data infrastructure, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and reliability engineering for systems serving millions of users.
• Own reliability, availability, and operational excellence for our production systems, including observability, incident response, deployment, and rollback systems
• Improve production readiness for services, migrations, and infrastructure changes
• Develop software that pushes the state of the art in performance, automation, observability, and other areas
• Scale systems running on dense, latest-generation, bare-metal servers in our own colocation facilities
• Reduce toil through automation, tooling, and thoughtful engineering practices
• Partner with engineers across all our teams to help design services with strong operational characteristics
• Lead incident reviews and turn contributing factors into concrete engineering improvements as we practice continuous improvement
• Perform capacity planning and cost management across compute, storage, database, and networking workloads
• Manage various vendor relationships to ensure we can provide high quality services at a reasonable TCO
• Mentor engineers on reliability, operability, debugging, and distributed systems practices and help define a culture of operational excellence across the org

You might be a good fit if you

• Have +10 years experience operating high-scale production systems, including bare metal
• Have strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, storage, databases, and distributed systems
• Have built and operated high-scale systems where correctness, latency, throughput, and availability were critical
• Can write production-quality software in Go
• Are comfortable debugging across application code, operating systems, databases, networks, and hardware
• Have experience with observability systems, alert design, incident response, capacity planning, kubernetes, and production automation
• Like working on very small, fast-moving teams at a startup
• Have read the AT Protocol docs, feel aligned with the mission, and want to contribute!

We're a fully remote team, but an overlap of working hours with PST is required, as is willingness to travel to team meetups once every 3-4 months. Please note, there may be an on-site component to these interviews. We offer health, dental, and vision insurance.

Additional Notes

Equity will be considered in the total compensation package. The final base salary for this role will be based on the individual's geographic location, as well as experience level, skill set, training, licenses and certifications.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $200,000 – $270,000 per year.

Staff Site Reliability Engineer · Remote (overlap with PST) · Full-time