Site Reliability Engineer

Specter•San Francisco, CA

41d

About The Position

Specter is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to manage the operational health of its connected sensor platform. This platform includes a live fleet of edge hardware deployed at customer sites and the supporting cloud infrastructure. This role offers significant ownership at the intersection of operations and platform engineering. The engineer will be responsible for improving reliability across the sensor fleet by triaging field issues, developing systems to prevent their recurrence, and implementing observability to proactively address problems as the company scales.

Requirements

Strong Linux systems administration — comfortable working over SSH in production, not just dev environments.
Experience with edge or on-prem hardware alongside cloud infrastructure.
Solid networking fundamentals: DNS, firewalls, VPNs, subnets, secure remote access.
Scripting or programming in Python, Go, or Bash for operational tooling.
Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes a plus).
Embedded systems experience — reading firmware logs, understanding hardware-software boundaries, and reasoning about what's happening below the OS is a meaningful edge in this role.
Deeper cloud experience (AWS infrastructure, IAM, networking, observability tooling) is a strong plus for owning the cloud side of the fleet.
Rust or C experience — we have firmware in both; being able to read and reason about low-level code accelerates triage significantly.

Nice To Haves

Kubernetes experience
Deeper cloud experience (AWS infrastructure, IAM, networking, observability tooling)
Rust or C experience

Responsibilities

Debug and triage issues across a live fleet of diverse Linux-based sensor nodes and edge appliances deployed at customer sites.
SSH into field hardware to diagnose, patch, and recover systems, often with limited remote access and incomplete information.
Own site bring-ups end to end; be the person who gets things back online.
Build and maintain fleet management systems: OTA update pipelines, device health tracking, remote diagnostics, and lifecycle tooling.
Identify repeat fires and eliminate them — build tooling, pre-deployment checks, and root cause processes that prevent recurrence.
Automate toil relentlessly: if you're doing something twice, you should be scripting it.
Collaborate with embedded systems, and platform teams to define reliability and deployment requirements.
Design and implement observability (logging, metrics, alerting) across edge devices and cloud infrastructure (AWS).
Surface and close telemetry gaps; build fleet-wide visibility that enables data-driven reliability decisions.
Develop runbooks, incident response procedures, and participate in on-call rotations.