Site Reliability Engineer

Vannevar builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.

How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.

About the role

We are looking for an Site Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, health, and deployment automation of the platform at Vannevar Labs. In this role you'll be the person watching the system's pulse — monitoring dashboards, catching health issues before they become incidents, and owning the debugging process from first alert to resolution. Your decisions today will have a large impact on the company's future.
We believe that simple systems are easier to understand, maintain, and scale. You will be making trade-offs as you work to ensure that our systems are prepared to operate reliably in high-side environments at scale. A strong sense of judgment matters here: knowing when to dig deeper into a problem yourself and when to pull in the right people to escalate. Clear, calm communication — during an incident and in day-to-day work — is a must.

What you'll do

• Monitor dashboards and system telemetry to detect health issues, performance degradation, and reliability risks — often before anyone else notices them.
• Own the debugging and incident response process end to end, exercising good judgment about when to investigate more deeply and when to escalate.
• Build logging, monitoring, and observability tooling to visualize the state of the platform and continuously mature our SRE practices.
• Develop, maintain, and be responsible for overall platform health, scaling, and capacity planning.
• Understand and help improve the deployment process, and automate build & deployment pipelines.
• Identify bottlenecks in engineering workflows and drive improvements that make the whole team faster and more reliable.
• Develop self-service tools and automation to improve engineering efficiency.
• Play a critical part in implementing a secure, robust, high-availability delivery pipeline.
• Communicate system status, trade-offs, and post-incident learnings clearly with teammates and stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or software engineering.
• Hands-on experience monitoring production systems and responding to incidents — comfortable owning a debugging process and making the call on when to dig in versus escalate.
• Excellent communication skills, especially the ability to stay clear and organized while troubleshooting live issues.
• Experience with the PLG stack, Datadog, or other enterprise monitoring/observability tools.
• Experience participating in an on-call rotation and running or contributing to post-mortems.
• Knowledge of AWS cloud technologies.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code technologies such as Terraform and Pulumi.
• Experience with Python, Bash, or other scripting languages.
• Experience working in an agile scrum environment, with the ability to work independently.
• Able to quickly learn new and existing technologies.
• Strong attention to detail and analytical capabilities.
• Willingness and ability to work on-site in San Diego, CA.
• U.S. Citizenship status is required, as this position requires the ability to access U.S.-only data systems and export-controlled data.
• TS/SCI Clearance required.

Additional Qualifications (Nice to haves)

• Experience defining and tracking SLOs/SLIs and error budgets.
• Experience crafting CI/CD processes and automation.
• Proficient with containerization technologies like Docker.
• Experience working in AWS GovCloud.
• Experience with modern web services architectures.
• Experience with relational database systems, including SQL and relational design.
• Experience working with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• Strong collaboration and negotiation skills, with the ability to work on cross-functional projects with internal partner engineering teams.