Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure

Nectar•Palo Alto, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Nectar is building an AI-native social operating system for social commerce, helping brands develop authentic relationships with their communities. The company was founded by former Meta product and engineering leaders and has raised over $30 million in capital. Its customers include Oura Health, Caraway, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Kosas, and OLIPOP. Nectar is hiring a software engineer to own the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of the production systems powering its platform. The systems support high-volume data ingestion pipelines and real-time AI agents. As one of the company’s first dedicated SREs, this person will have substantial ownership in defining how infrastructure is measured, operated, and hardened, and will establish reliability foundations for the growing engineering organization.

Requirements

At least 5 years of experience operating production systems as an SRE, infrastructure engineer, or platform engineer.
Experience scaling databases, data infrastructure, or complex production platforms under significant load.
Hands-on expertise with cloud infrastructure such as AWS and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
Solid programming skills for building automation, tooling, and operational services.
Comfort operating in fast-moving startup environments with high ownership and autonomy.
A reliability-first mindset balanced with pragmatism about velocity and cost.

Nice To Haves

Experience establishing or maturing an SRE practice at an early-stage or rapidly scaling company.
Familiarity with AWS, Pulumi, Postgres, ClickHouse, Turbopuffer, or Temporal.
Background in capacity planning, performance engineering, or cost optimization at scale.

Responsibilities

Own the reliability and scalability of production systems handling growing volumes of social data and real-time AI workloads.
Define and drive SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, and build supporting observability, alerting, and on-call practices.
Lead incident response and blameless postmortems, and implement systemic improvements to prevent recurrence.
Improve performance, cost efficiency, and capacity planning across cloud infrastructure as the platform scales.
Harden infrastructure-as-code, deployment, and CI/CD pipelines for resilience and repeatability.
Partner with engineering teams to embed reliability into system design and raise the organization’s operational standards.

Benefits

Competitive compensation and early equity.
Health, vision, and dental benefits.
401(k) match.
ClassPass membership for fitness and wellness classes.
Hybrid schedule: 4 days in office, plus 3 remote flex days per quarter after the first 3 months.
$1,000/month housing stipend for living near the office.
$50/month mobile stipend.
Commuter benefits, including a train stipend or Palo Alto parking reimbursement.
Free lunch in the office.
Clear career growth opportunities as the company scales.