Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Core Cloud Platform

Lambda•San Francisco, CA

2d•$240,000 - $356,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Lambda’s Core Cloud Platform powers compute provisioning and infrastructure orchestration across our physical data centers. We are looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to improve the reliability, scalability, and operational maturity of these systems as Lambda’s fleet and customer base grow. You will work across Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, observability, deployment systems, and incident response to build a resilient foundation for customer AI workloads.

Requirements

Have 7+ years of experience in site reliability, infrastructure, distributed systems, or production software engineering.
Have deep experience operating Kubernetes in production.
Understand Kubernetes architecture, scheduling, networking, resource management, upgrades, and common failure modes.
Have experience with physical data centers, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or environments without full reliance on managed services.
Are proficient with Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools.
Have built CI/CD or GitOps workflows using tools such as Argo CD, Flux, Helm, or Kustomize.
Have experience with observability platforms such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.
Can build production-quality tooling in Go, Python, or a similar language.
Understand distributed systems concepts including consistency, retries, idempotency, backpressure, and partial failure.
Have experience defining and operating against SLIs and SLOs.
Can lead effectively during high-severity incidents.
Approach recurring operational issues as engineering and automation problems.
Communicate clearly and work effectively across teams.
Bring strong ownership, sound judgment, and low ego.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI infrastructure, GPU platforms, or high-performance computing.
Experience operating distributed systems across multiple regions or data centers.
Experience with Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, admission control, or scheduler extensions.
Experience with etcd performance, backup, restore, or disaster recovery.
Experience with Linux systems, container runtimes, cgroups, storage, or networking.
Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or automated remediation.
Experience with Kubernetes RBAC, OIDC, workload identity, or certificate management.
Familiarity with SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar compliance frameworks.

Responsibilities

Operate and scale critical platform services across Lambda’s data centers.
Improve the reliability of compute provisioning, Instance lifecycle, and regional orchestration systems.
Build monitoring, alerting, and tracing for service health, provisioning latency, and customer-impacting failures.
Define SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and operational readiness standards.
Automate detection and remediation of configuration drift, failed workflows, and orphaned resources.
Build safe deployment, rollback, and disaster recovery workflows using infrastructure as code and GitOps.
Design fault-isolation mechanisms that reduce blast radius and prevent cascading failures.
Lead production incident response, postmortems, and durable corrective actions.
Partner with Compute, Networking, Storage, Security, and Support teams.
Participate in on-call and improve its sustainability through automation and better tooling.
Mentor engineers and raise the reliability bar across the organization.