Primer exists to make the world a safer place. We do this by providing trusted decision-ready AI to the world's most critical organizations. Our software enables leaders, operators, and analysts to better understand the changing world around us in real time and make informed decisions when the stakes are high. Primer has offices in San Francisco, Pasadena, CA and Arlington, VA. For more information, please visit https://primer.ai/
As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you will be a key member of our Infrastructure team, dedicated to designing, building, and maintaining fault-tolerant systems. You will collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to define and meet service level objectives (SLOs), implement and enhance observability, and contribute to the evolution of our Engineering practices. Your expertise in observability, capacity planning, automation, and incident management will be critical to sustaining our mission-critical operations and delivering a seamless experience for developers and customers alike.
Role Responsibilities - How You Will Make an Impact
- Architect, Build, and Scale: Design and architect our solutions for continuous availability and scalability in production.
- Uphold Reliability Standards: Define and review Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets. Work with engineering teams to ensure new services or features meet reliability and performance targets.
- Drive Automation & Tooling: Develop tools, frameworks, and platforms to streamline repetitive tasks (e.g., monitoring, incident response). Write software that improves reliability and security (e.g., automated testing, canary deployments).
- Incident Management & Postmortems: Participate in on-call (Livesite) rotations; lead and coordinate incident responses. Conduct thorough post-incident reviews, share learnings, and implement improvements to mitigate future occurrences.
- Observability Best Practices: Develop and maintain best-in-class monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to provide actionable insights into the health of infrastructure and services. Advise teams on instrumentation best practices, ensuring comprehensive coverage of critical paths and dependencies.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, software engineers, and security teams to deliver end-to-end solutions with reliability built in.
Technical Skills - Need to Have (Required)
- 10+ years experience in production systems engineering, SRE, or DevOps roles supporting large-scale, mission-critical platforms
- 10+ years experience with Linux systems administration and Bash/Linux scripting
- 5+ years experience with observability tools (monitoring, logging, tracing) such as Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, ELK, or similar
- 5+ years experience with microservices architectures, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
- 2+ years experience in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go) with a strong focus on building automation and tooling
- Solid understanding of cloud networking (e.g., mesh networking, TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, VPNs)
Nice to Have:
- Experience building or running distributed systems that include GPU heavy workloads or LLMs
- Strong knowledge of the AWS platform with experience in cost optimization and capacity planning
- Track record of leading incident response efforts and conducting detailed postmortems
- Security awareness and familiarity with secure coding, encryption, and compliance best practices
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex topics to both technical and non-technical audiences
The annual cash compensation range for this position is US $180,000 to US $230,000. Final compensation will be determined based on experience and skills and may vary from the range listed above.
Primer works closely with the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment. Any offer of employment is conditioned on an applicant or employee being able to meet any applicable government contract requirements. The company may rescind any offer of employment to an applicant or terminate an employee if the applicant or employee is unable to perform the functions of the position in compliance with applicable government contracts or if an applicant or employee makes a false attestation of compliance.
What We Offer
We are a series D funded company with investors from Addition, USIT, Lux Capital, Amplify Partners, Addition Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and others. We are intentional around building a diverse and inclusive team of subject matter experts to better advocate for the needs of our users.
We care a lot about our work and about the well being of our team. We encourage everyone to work at a sustainable pace and have a flexible vacation policy for team members to utilize, Wellness Days and 100% paid leave for parents of growing families.
We offer competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits. This includes full medical, dental, and vision coverage, fertility benefits through Carrot, mental health coverage on demand with Headspace Care+, Gympass+ Membership via Wellhub, One Medical Membership, 401(k), remote work stipends, and monthly internet allowance.
Primer is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. Please see the United States Department of Labor's EEO poster and EEO poster supplement for additional information.
If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected].
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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What We Do
We build machines that can read and write, automating the analysis of very large datasets. Primer's technology is deployed by some of the world’s largest government agencies, financial institutions, and Fortune 50 companies.
Our mission is to accelerate our understanding of the world.
Why Work With Us
We are building machine intelligence that pushes the edge of what is currently possible. This requires a team effort in the deepest sense, whether you are honing an algorithm to solve a problem or working with our customers to identify their most important problems. We value initiative, creativity, and integrity. We take care of each other.
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