Principal Core Engineer — Infra / SRE

Sourcedirect Talent • Denver, CO

2d • $190,000 - $215,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

We’re looking for a Principal Infrastructure / SRE Engineer to own the reliability, scalability, upgradeability, and operational excellence of an edge platform operating at fleet scale. In this role, you’ll be the technical authority for designing and operating compound capabilities that span software, infrastructure, networking, security, data, and hardware. You’ll help ensure that fleets of thousands of devices can be reliably deployed, upgraded, and managed with the highest level of technical rigor. You’ll set and enforce production standards and have the authority to stop changes that could put fleet safety or reliability at risk. During high-severity incidents, you’ll serve as the technical owner, leading root-cause analysis and driving durable fixes across teams. This is a hands-on role for someone who thrives in a high-ownership environment and wants to build the infrastructure that makes real-world AI possible. You’ll work in an AI-native way, using AI to assist with diagnostics and operations while ensuring all production changes remain governed, reviewed, and auditable.

Requirements

• 10+ years building and operating production infrastructure and distributed systems, including reliability engineering at scale across complex, multi-tenant, or fleet environments.
• Deep experience with SRE practices, including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, observability, incident response, postmortems, and operational automation.
• Experience with Kubernetes-based platforms, Linux systems, and infrastructure-as-code automation.
• Strong systems thinking across software, infrastructure, networking, and security, with the ability to drive outcomes across multiple domains and enforce production standards.
• Proven ability to lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives end-to-end with strong technical judgment, crisp execution, and disciplined change management.
• Clear communicator and trusted technical partner to engineering leadership, with the ability to lead high-severity incident response and drive cross-team alignment.
• Ownership mindset focused on outcomes rather than tasks.

Nice To Haves

• Designing and operating fleet management and upgrade systems at scale, including safe rollout and rollback, configuration management, and health monitoring.
• Experience with canary deployments, staged rollouts, and verifiable rollback mechanisms.
• Building observability platforms that make complex systems diagnosable and measurable across large distributed deployments.
• Experience with metrics, logs, tracing pipelines, alerting, and dashboards that drive operational action.
• Security-first operations experience involving secure boot, signed updates, audit logging, default-deny postures, and governed production changes.
• Experience operating systems under real-world edge constraints, including limited connectivity, bandwidth limitations, variable environments, and high reliability requirements.
• Building automation that reduces operational variance across large fleets.
• Applying AI to operations and engineering workflows, including automated diagnostics, agentic triage, runbook generation, and anomaly detection, while keeping production pathways reviewed and auditable.

Responsibilities

• Own platform-wide reliability and scalability architecture across the fleet, including upgradeability, rollback safety, resilience, observability, and incident response.
• Lead the design and delivery of compound capabilities spanning multiple specialist domains, including hardware, networking, security, data, infrastructure, and AI runtime.
• Set and enforce production-grade standards for operational excellence, including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, on-call readiness, change management, incident management, and postmortem practices.
• Maintain the authority to stop changes that introduce unacceptable operational or fleet-level risk.
• Serve as the technical owner during high-severity incidents, leading diagnosis, root-cause analysis, and coordinated remediation across teams.
• Design and operate secure, automated fleet lifecycle systems for deployment, updates, configuration management, and health management at scale.
• Drive the evolution of observability and telemetry systems, including metrics, logs, traces, audit data, and fleet state, so issues are detectable, diagnosable, and preventable.
• Partner with engineering and commercial teams to translate real-world constraints into platform-level requirements and prioritization decisions.
• Develop and use AI systems to accelerate diagnostics, automate operational workflows, and increase engineering velocity while ensuring production pathways remain governed, reviewed, and auditable.
• Mentor senior engineers across domains, review technical designs, and raise the quality bar for architecture and reliability across the organization.

Benefits

• Work in a high-ownership, real-world startup environment where you can move quickly, build new systems, and see your impact directly through systems operating in the field.
• Use modern AI tools throughout development, documentation, planning, troubleshooting, and operational workflows to accelerate execution.
• Take on challenging technical problems across next-generation cloud and IoT, hardware/software/networking in real-world edge environments, data and AI inference, and secure systems operating in demanding OT settings.
• Learn quickly by working with exceptional teammates and collaborating directly with industry leaders across software, AI, and infrastructure.
• Base salary range of $190,000–$215,000, depending on location, experience, and comparable internal compensation.
• Eligibility for meaningful equity through stock options in an early-stage, high-growth company.
• Eligibility to participate in company benefit plans, which may include health, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) with company match, flexible PTO, paid parental leave, commuter benefits, and relocation and visa support for eligible roles.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed