Senior Site Reliability Engineer

RapidSOS • Boston, MA

6h • Hybrid

About The Position

At RapidSOS, we are committed to using technology to build a safer, stronger future and working together to save lives. RapidSOS is the leading public safety AI company that unlocks mission-critical intelligence for first responders and security teams – enabling faster, smarter and more accurate emergency response. This role is about working on systems where reliability directly impacts real-world outcomes, powering emergency response and ensuring critical data gets to the right place at the right time. The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will own the performance and stability of services that operate at scale in real-world, high-stakes environments. You’ll work across infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and service-level application code, identifying and resolving issues at their root cause while proactively shaping how systems are built to improve reliability from the start. You’ll go beyond surface-level fixes, digging into everything from service behavior in Kubernetes to application-level decisions that impact performance, cost, and reliability. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering teams to improve how our systems are built, observed, and operated. Along the way, you’ll help shape how we approach reliability as a discipline—closing visibility gaps, improving resilience, and ensuring our platform performs when it matters most.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional engineering experience with deep expertise in Python
• Real cloud infrastructure experience with AWS: networking, managed databases, cost implications of traffic routing decisions, IAM, DNS-based routing and failover
• Hands-on kubernetes experience with containerized workloads in production across EKS, ECS, or Fargate, you can read events, understand resource limits, know when to drain vs. delete a node, and understand the tradeoffs between orchestration models
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and how they fail, including resource exhaustion, replication lag, queue backpressure, and other common failure modes
• Experience operating high-throughput messaging systems (RabbitMQ, Kafka, AWS SNS / SQS, etc.) and the infrastructure around them, including infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines, with an emphasis on improving reliability and scalability
• Experience building or improving observability through logging, metrics, and alerting
• Demonstrable experience in using AI to safely and securely enhance velocity, improve reliability and recoverability of services
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills; is a team player with a positive attitude
• Highly self-motivated; ability to adapt and learn quickly in a fast-paced environment with a strong sense of ownership
• Strong proficiency in coding best practices – ability to write clean, maintainable, and testable code
• Demonstrated expertise in problem solving – comfortable working across both infrastructure and application layers to diagnose and resolve issues at the source
• Ability and willingness to collaborate in-person a few times per quarter, or as needed

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting production systems in an on-call or similar capacity where reliability matters
• Experience with observability and GitOps tooling; hands-on with Datadog (APM, alerting), Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and ArgoCD-based GitOps deployments; comfortable modernizing legacy CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Concourse, Jenkins) toward cloud-native approaches

Responsibilities

• Own performance and reliability outcomes: Ownership of how application-level decisions create system-level impact, including connection pooling, database architecture, traffic routing patterns, and memory allocation. Collaboration with engineering teams that own specific domains, partnering directly to improve reliability and performance across their systems.
• Design for system resilience: Responsibility for strengthening reliability through proactive design decisions, including safer deployment patterns, failover strategies, and redundancy approaches that improve system behavior under stress.
• Build observability into system behavior: Proactively instrument services with structured logging, metrics, and alerting so systems are easier to understand and debug. The focus is on creating clear signals from production behavior before issues escalate.
• Own incidents from signal to resolution: Ownership of production issues from first signal through resolution, including investigation across infrastructure and application layers, root cause identification, and implementation of fixes that restore stability and strengthen system behavior long term.
• Work across the stack without a permission slip: You’ll work across infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and service-level application code. When issues come up, you don’t wait for a handoff—ownership is taken directly and driven through to resolution.

Benefits

• The chance to work with a passionate team on solving one of the largest challenges globally
• Competitive salary and benefits and equity participation
• A dynamic, flexible and fun start-up work environment with a highly talented team

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 101-250 employees