Senior Staff Lead Site Reliability Engineer (R5803)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies.

With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.

Job Description

Hivemind is looking for an experienced SRE lead to help drive the establishment of our SRE function.

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