Sr. Staff Lead Site Reliability Engineer (R5803)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Job Description: Hivemind is looking for an experienced SRE lead to help drive the establishment of our SRE function.  

As the SRE lead, you will establish and mature the reliability practices used across our cloud infrastructure and platform services. You will work with Cloud Engineering and product teams to define reliability targets, improve observability, and ensure that production systems can be operated and recovered predictably. 

This is a deeply technical, hands-on role. You will investigate complex failures, improve the systems and tooling used to operate our platforms, and turn lessons from incidents into engineering improvements. You will provide technical leadership for reliability engineering, helping teams adopt practices that improve system health without adding unnecessary process. 

You will act as a thought-leader and mentor within the Cloud Engineering and Reliability teams to level up teammates and encourage building with a reliability-first mindset. 

What You'll Do:

Define and implement SLIs, SLOs, and other measures of service reliability  

Build and improve monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing for infrastructure and platform services  

Lead technical response to complex incidents and drive root-cause analysis through resolution  

Identify recurring failure modes and work with engineering teams to eliminate them  

Improve system resilience through automation, testing, capacity planning, and failure recovery  

Develop tooling and automation that reduces manual operational work  

Partner with product and platform teams to incorporate reliability requirements into system design  

Establish incident response practices that improve detection, diagnosis, communication, and recovery  

Mentor product engineers and drive adoption of strong reliability and operational practices 

Mentor teammates in SRE and Cloud Engineering 

Define and manage short-and-long term SRE roadmap, distributing work across teammates 

Required Qualifications:

7+ years of experience in SRE, software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related fields  

Experience operating production services with defined availability and reliability requirements  

Experience implementing SLIs, SLOs, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices  

Experience designing and operating infrastructure in AWS or another major cloud environment  

Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automated infrastructure provisioning 

Experience supporting containerized applications and distributed systems  

Experience developing operational tooling or automation using Python, Go, or a similar language  

Ability to diagnose complex failures across applications, infrastructure, networking, and dependent services  

Experience leading incident response and root-cause analysis across engineering teams  

Experience leading and executing on technical vision of a team over multi-quarter timelines 

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience establishing or maturing an SRE function within an engineering organization  

Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native observability systems  

Experience operating systems in regulated or compliance-driven environments  

Experience with capacity planning, performance analysis, and cloud cost management  

Background supporting shared infrastructure across multiple products or engineering organizations 

Experience with building roadmaps in ticketing systems 

Experience acting as …