Job Description
As the SRE lead, you will establish and mature the reliability practices used across our cloud infrastructure and platform services. You will work with Cloud Engineering and product teams to define reliability targets, improve observability, and ensure that production systems can be operated and recovered predictably.
This is a deeply technical, hands-on role. You will investigate complex failures, improve the systems and tooling used to operate our platforms, and turn lessons from incidents into engineering improvements. You will provide technical leadership for reliability engineering, helping teams adopt practices that improve system health without adding unnecessary process.
You will act as a thought-leader and mentor within the Cloud Engineering and Reliability teams to level up teammates and encourage building with a reliability-first mindset.
What You'll Do
- Define and implement SLIs, SLOs, and other measures of service reliability
- Build and improve monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing for infrastructure and platform services
- Lead technical response to complex incidents and drive root-cause analysis through resolution
- Identify recurring failure modes and work with engineering teams to eliminate them
- Improve system resilience through automation, testing, capacity planning, and failure recovery
- Develop tooling and automation that reduces manual operational work
- Partner with product and platform teams to incorporate reliability requirements into system design
- Establish incident response practices that improve detection, diagnosis, communication, and recovery
- Mentor product engineers and drive adoption of strong reliability and operational practices
- Mentor teammates in SRE and Cloud Engineering
- Define and manage short-and-long term SRE roadmap, distributing work across teammates
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience in SRE, software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related fields
- Experience operating production services with defined availability and reliability requirements
- Experience implementing SLIs, SLOs, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices
- Experience designing and operating infrastructure in AWS or another major cloud environment
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automated infrastructure provisioning
- Experience supporting containerized applications and distributed systems
- Experience developing operational tooling or automation using Python, Go, or a similar language
- Ability to diagnose complex failures across applications, infrastructure, networking, and dependent services
- Experience leading incident response and root-cause analysis across engineering teams
- Experience leading and executing on technical vision of a team over multi-quarter timelines
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience establishing or maturing an SRE function within an engineering organization
- Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native observability systems
- Experience operating systems in regulated or compliance-driven environments
- Experience with capacity planning, performance analysis, and cloud cost management
- Background supporting shared infrastructure across multiple products or engineering organizations
- Experience with building roadmaps in ticketing systems
- Experience acting as a mentor for other engineers
Skills Required
- 7+ years of experience in SRE, software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related fields
- Experience operating production services with defined availability and reliability requirements
- Experience implementing SLIs, SLOs, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices
- Experience designing and operating infrastructure in AWS or another major cloud environment
- Experience with infrastructure as code and automated infrastructure provisioning
- Experience supporting containerized applications and distributed systems
- Experience developing operational tooling or automation using Python, Go, or a similar language
- Ability to diagnose complex failures across applications, infrastructure, networking, and dependent services
- Experience leading incident response and root-cause analysis across engineering teams
- Experience leading and executing on technical vision of a team over multi-quarter timelines
- Experience establishing or maturing an SRE function within an engineering organization
- Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native observability systems
- Experience operating systems in regulated or compliance-driven environments
- Experience with capacity planning, performance analysis, and cloud cost management
- Background supporting shared infrastructure across multiple products or engineering organizations
- Experience building roadmaps in ticketing systems
- Experience acting as a mentor for other engineers
What the Team is Saying
Shield AI Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage is described as excellent, with dental/vision and mental‑health support, and ancillary protections like life and disability appearing in benefit summaries. The breadth and perceived affordability of coverage are highlighted as a standout component of the package.
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Parental & Family Support — Paid parental leave is featured alongside enhanced maternity benefits, fertility and childcare support, and onsite resources such as a Mother’s Room. These elements are positioned as competitive and above the minimal baseline for the company’s stage.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is granted to all full‑time hires, with RSUs, double‑trigger tax timing, and tools to model scenarios (e.g., through Carta Tax). Communications also reference a transition from options to RSUs, reinforcing access and maturity of ownership programs.
Shield AI Insights
What We Do
At Shield AI, you won't wait years to see your work reach the field. You'll build hardware and software that operates in the real world right now, in the hands of the people who depend on it. Hivemind, our AI pilot, has been flying since 2018. It has flown more than 30 platforms, including an F-16, and it now sits under a U.S. Air Force production contract for Collaborative Combat Aircraft. When you write code or shape a system here, you contribute to technology with a proven flight record and a clear production future. V-BAT flies intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions with an operational record that stretches from Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific. It delivers eyes where they matter most, in the most demanding conditions on earth. The teams behind it watch their work get tested where the stakes are real. X-BAT takes its first flight this year. It's an AI-piloted fighter that needs no runway, built to operate where traditional aircraft can't. Join now and you help shape a program at its earliest, most formative stage. That's the kind of ground-floor work that defines a career. Do the most impactful work of your life, on problems that matter. Autonomy at this level asks a lot of you. You'll take on problems in perception, planning, and control that few teams anywhere are equipped to solve. You'll work across disciplines, from aerospace and robotics to machine learning and systems engineering, alongside people who hold themselves to an exacting standard and expect the same from you. Our mission is clear: protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. That purpose runs through every decision, every design review, and every deployment. It's why the work here carries a weight you can feel. Ready to join our mission? Explore our open roles and find where you fit.
Why Work With Us
Founded in 2015 by a former Navy SEAL, Shield AI builds AI pilots and uncrewed aircraft. Veterans aren't an afterthought here, they're at every level. It's why the work carries weight: AI pilots and uncrewed aircraft flying real missions, from Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific, protecting service members and civilians.
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Shield AI Teams
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Shield AI Offices
Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
