Site Reliability Engineer, Strategic Defense

Anduril • Columbia, WA

1d • $147,000 - $196,000

About The Position

The Strategic Defense team at Anduril develops software-defined command and control systems to counter ballistic, hypersonic, and air-breathing threats. The multidisciplinary team works across autonomy, tracking, simulation and wargaming, hardware, systems engineering, and test and evaluation to build and field an accredited fire control system, while incubating AI-native offerings for integrated air and missile defense.

The Site Reliability Engineer provisions and operates infrastructure that supports deployed customer systems. The role spans bare-metal server provisioning and hardening, self-managed Kubernetes operations, software delivery to disconnected and air-gapped environments, and troubleshooting from the Linux kernel through networking and Kubernetes. The engineer works closely with software, data, and operations engineers and may travel to customer sites to install and support systems, sometimes as the only engineer on site. The position calls for a pragmatic, fast, mission-focused approach and sound engineering judgment.

Requirements

• Currently possess and be able to maintain an active U.S. Top Secret security clearance.
• Have 3–8+ years of hands-on infrastructure, systems, or site reliability engineering experience.
• Understand Linux process states, system calls, memory, file systems and inodes, systemd, permissions, and SELinux; be able to investigate processes from the shell without a cloud console.
• Understand networking fundamentals including TCP/UDP, DHCP, DNS, routing, VLANs, and firewalls, and be able to trace a request hop by hop from client to pod and identify tools for each step.
• Understand Kubernetes below the managed layer, including Services, kube-proxy, CNI, DNS, scheduling, requests and limits, and storage, and be able to troubleshoot with kubectl rather than a UI.
• Write Python and Bash from scratch for tasks such as parsing logs and text, handling files and processes, and implementing retries and error handling; be able to read and fix existing scripts.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building, deploying, or operating systems on air-gapped, classified, or security-hardened networks.
• Experience designing distributed systems for edge or disconnected, intermittent, and limited (DIL) conditions, including mesh networks, store-and-forward, peer distribution, or QoS.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and GitOps tools such as Terraform, Ansible, ArgoCD, or Flux; Nix experience is a plus.
• Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or OpenTelemetry, and using their signals to guide alerting and capacity decisions.
• Experience with platform and supply-chain security, including image signing, PKI and certificate authorities, LUKS disk encryption, or FIPS.
• Ability to read, debug, and modify software written in Go, Python, Rust, or C++.

Responsibilities

• Provision bare-metal servers at scale, taking them from rack installation to production through PXE boot, kickstart, BMC/iDRAC, firmware management, STIG hardening, and Kubernetes handoff.
• Operate self-managed Kubernetes clusters, including RKE2, k3s, and Talos, on-premises and at the edge; manage networking, storage, upgrades, and capacity.
• Design methods for delivering software and data to hundreds of nodes that may be offline, have limited bandwidth, and have short update windows.
• Ship and update systems on air-gapped and classified networks, including through cross-domain solutions and data diodes.
• Debug failures across Linux, networking, and Kubernetes, and lead root-cause analysis and postmortems.
• Automate infrastructure toil by writing Python and Bash tooling and managing infrastructure as code.
• Travel to customer sites to install and support systems, often as the only engineer on site.

Benefits

• Highly competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full-time offers and are considered part of total compensation.
• Anduril offers a comprehensive, competitive benefits package available at little to no cost to employees.

What This Job Offers

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