Who we are:
At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer's needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful.
Our values:
- Listen first • We are experts in product practices but lifelong learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand.
- Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients.
- Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success.
We're looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to embed with a fast-growing AI developer platform company. You'll help their customers run the platform on their own infrastructure: deploying it, keeping it healthy at scale, and making upgrades boring. This role suits someone who has run stateful, self-hosted software in Kubernetes for demanding customers and wants to point that experience at agentic AI.
Key Responsibilities:
Self-Hosted Platform Reliability
- Deploy, upgrade, and operate a containerized AI platform in customer-owned Kubernetes environments using Helm and GitOps (ArgoCD)
- Own the health of stateful backing services in-cluster, including Postgres, Redis, and ClickHouse
- Troubleshoot deployments across varied customer setups, including private networking, air-gapped, and regulated environments
- Turn recurring customer issues into better Helm charts, runbooks, and documentation
Site Reliability Engineering
- Define and track SLIs and SLOs for self-hosted deployments
- Lead incident response and blameless post-mortems
- Do capacity planning and performance tuning for high-volume trace and event data
- Reduce toil through automation
Infrastructure & Cloud
- Build and maintain infrastructure with Terraform across AWS, GCP, and Azure (EKS, GKE, AKS)
- Build CI/CD pipelines that test upgrade paths and catch regressions before customers do
- Apply security best practices: secrets management, RBAC, network policy, SSO
Required Qualifications:
- 6+ years in SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering
- Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Helm in production
- Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD or Flux)
- Experience operating stateful services in Kubernetes (Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse, Kafka, or similar)
- Proficiency with Terraform or similar IaC tools
- Experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and its managed Kubernetes service
- Solid scripting and automation skills (Python, Go, or Bash)
- Comfortable working directly with customers to debug their environments
Preferred Qualifications (Exceptional Candidates):
- Experience supporting self-hosted or on-prem deployments of a commercial software product
- Experience with air-gapped or regulated environments (FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 2)
- Familiarity with observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Honeycomb)
- Exposure to LLM applications, agent frameworks, or LLM observability and evaluation tools
What Sets Exceptional Candidates Apart:
- You've written or maintained Helm charts that other teams depend on
- You've scaled ClickHouse or another analytical database under heavy ingest
- Contributions to open-source infrastructure or AI tooling
- Strong technical writing; your runbooks get used
What to know before you apply:
- This role will require being in the Chicago office 3 days per week and up to 20% travel within the United States.
- Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of the employment Visa process at this time.
- The Chicago base salary range for this role is $165,000 - $200,000.
Skills Required
- 6+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering
- Deep hands-on production experience with Kubernetes and Helm
- Experience with GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux
- Experience operating stateful services in Kubernetes, such as Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse, or Kafka
- Proficiency with Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools
- Experience with at least one major cloud provider and its managed Kubernetes service
- Scripting and automation skills in Python, Go, or Bash
- Ability to work directly with customers to debug their environments
- Experience supporting self-hosted or on-premises commercial software deployments
- Experience with air-gapped or regulated environments, including FedRAMP, HIPAA, or SOC 2
- Familiarity with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Honeycomb
- Exposure to LLM applications, agent frameworks, or LLM observability and evaluation tools
- Experience maintaining Helm charts used by other teams
- Experience scaling ClickHouse or another analytical database under heavy ingest
- Contributions to open-source infrastructure or AI tooling
- Strong technical writing skills
Focused Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Focused and has not been reviewed or approved by Focused.
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Parental & Family Support — Paid leave is offered for both birth and non-birth parents, with a structured transition period to ease the return to work. Adoption assistance and company-sponsored family events reinforce a family-friendly environment.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) plan includes employer matching with no vesting period, supporting long-term savings. The presence of a clear match structure signals a stable retirement benefit.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Generous PTO combines vacation, sick days, and floating holidays to support work-life balance. Company materials emphasize using time off and taking breaks to maintain wellbeing.
Focused Insights
What We Do
Focused is a software services company that builds agentic AI and custom software. Our expert engineers and designers build custom agents that integrate seamlessly with the systems you already run. What sets Focused apart is our hands-on, collaborative approach. We don’t just build and deliver software, we partner with your teams to ensure that we are building the right solution to meet both present and future demands.
Why Work With Us
We love to write code, and if you do too, you will love Focused. Everything we do from our sustainable pace to minimal meetings is designed to optimize your time writing software! Focused is truly a place to grow or hone your software craft - you could see 2-3 clients in a year and each one presents things to learn.
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