Senior Site Reliability Engineer
About Us: Collaborative autonomy is how self-tasking teams of machines will solve hard human problems, and HavocAI is an unquestioned leader in collaborative autonomy. We set the standard for autonomous surface vessels for a wide range of defense and commercial maritime missions. Success requires us to grow quickly, and we’re looking for teammates who are passionate about solving hard problems, about pushing the envelope, and about preventing conflict and saving lives. Ambition is welcome to apply within.
About the Role
HavocAI is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer with 7+ years of experience designing, operating, and scaling highly reliable distributed systems. In this role, you will serve as a key technical leader within the Cloud Platform team, responsible for ensuring the availability, performance, and resilience of mission-critical services supporting autonomy, simulation, and data-intensive workloads. You will work closely with Cloud Platform, DevOps, Data Engineering, and Autonomy teams to establish reliability standards, improve operational maturity, and build systems that scale safely under real-world conditions. The ideal candidate is deeply technical, calm under pressure, and experienced in owning reliability outcomes end to end.
Key Responsibilities
Reliability Engineering & Architecture Design and evolve reliability architecture for distributed and cloud-hosted systems Define and implement SRE best practices, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and capacity planning Partner with platform and application teams to design systems for reliability, scalability, and operability Identify and mitigate systemic reliability risks across infrastructure, applications, services, and data pipelines Establish reliability patterns that support autonomy, simulation, and mission-critical cloud workloads Operations & Incident Management Lead incident response processes, including on-call rotations, escalation paths, and post-incident reviews Conduct root cause analysis for complex production incidents and drive long-term corrective actions Improve operational readiness through runbooks, automation, resilience testing, and production-readiness reviews Reduce operational toil through tooling, automation, and process improvements Help build a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement across production systems Observability & Performance Design, implement, and maintain observability systems for metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and service health Ensure services and data pipelines are observable, debuggable, and performant in production Drive performance analysis and tuning across infrastructure, application, and service layers Improve alert quality, reduce noise, and ensure operational signals are actionable Partner with engineering teams to define meaningful reliability and performance metrics Automation & Platform Collaboration Build automation to improve system reliability, deployment safety, and recovery processes Partner with DevOps and Cloud Platform teams on CI/CD reliability, rollout strategies, and safe deployment patterns Support and improve Kubernetes-based environments and containerized workloads Contribute to infrastructure-as-code practices and platform automation Help define operational standards for cloud infrastructure, deployment workflows, and production services Security & Resilience Collaborate with security teams to ensure secure and resilient system design Participate in disaster recovery planning, backup strategy, and resilience testing Maintain strong operational practices around access control, secrets management, change management, and production access Support secure operations for systems that may serve defense, autonomy, or mission-sensitive use cases Requirements 7+ years of experience in SRE, infrastructure engineering, systems engineering, or related roles Strong experience operating large-scale distributed production systems Deep understanding of Linux systems, networking, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems fundamentals Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration Programming or scripting experience in Go, Python, or similar languages Experience designing and operating observability systems for production environments Proven ability to lead incident response and drive reliability improvements Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across engineering teams Ability to operate calmly and effectively under pressure Must be a U.S. Citizen and eligible to obtain a U.S. Government security clearance if required
Nice to Have
Experience supporting autonomy, robotics, simulation, real-time systems, or data-intensive platforms Familiarity with AWS and large-scale cloud infrastructure Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or resilience testing Knowledge of CI/CD systems and progressive delivery practices Experience working in high-reliability, safety-critical, defense, or mission-critical environments Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, ELK/OpenSearch, or similar observability tools Success in This Role A successful Senior Site Reliability Engineer at HavocAI will raise the reliability, performance, and operational maturity of the systems that support our autonomy and cloud platform work. You will help ensure that mission-critical services are observable, resilient, scalable, and recoverable. You will bring structure to incident response, reduce operational toil, improve deployment safety, and partner with engineering teams to design systems that can handle real-world operational demands. This role is ideal for someone who combines deep systems expertise with strong ownership, practical judgment, and a bias toward building durable solutions. Benefits: 100% Employer paid Health, Dental and Vision Insurance for you and your families Life Insurance (Employer Paid) Ability to participate in the companies 401k program (Matching) Unlimited PTO policy with an enforced 2 week minimum Equity Package Work / Home Office Stipend Global Entry 16 Week Paid Parental Leave Monthly Health and Wellness Stipend Our Values: Innovation: We are driven to break new ground. Every day presents an opportunity to challenge the status quo, think boldly, and deliver advanced solutions that transform the future of defense technology. Integrity: We hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards, ensuring transparency, accountability, and trust in all our actions and partnerships. Mission-Driven: We are focused on achieving impactful outcomes that align with our core mission—protecting lives through innovation. Forward-Leaning: We continuously seek out new opportunities and remain at the forefront of technological advancements. We embrace change and anticipate the challenges of tomorrow with confidence and creativity. Ownership of All Tasks: At HavocAI, no problem is too complex or too trivial. We believe that greatness comes from tackling the hardest challenges, but also in handling the smallest, sometimes thankless, tasks with the same level of commitment and care. Servant Leadership: We lead by serving others, whether it’s supporting our employees, partners, or the broader community. Empowering those around us is key to achieving long-term success and making a lasting impact. HavocAI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status. Apply To This Job