Senior Staff Lead Site Reliability Engineer, Shield AI
$220-340k
Offers bonus and equity
Office located in San Mateo, CA
Building AI aircraft pilots
Job no longer available
Building AI aircraft pilots
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$220-340k
Offers bonus and equity
Office located in San Mateo, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems.
Role
Who you are
- 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
Desirable
- 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 a mentor for other engineers
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Self-driving vehicles present enormous benefits for the transportation industry, with the potential to increase the safety and efficiency of cars, trucks, and commercial airlines. However, such technological innovation is less present within the military transportation sector, despite the benefits that AI piloting would produce for the operation of drones and aircraft.
Shield AI is developing Hivemind, an AI-driven pilot that can operate drones and aircraft autonomously, without needing GPS, communications, or pilots. In addition to navigation, the technology is also designed to facilitate indoor building clearance, integrated defence breaching, and has the ability to learn and autonomously execute aircraft missions.
Whilst similar AI-driven pilot software has begun to appear in Chinese military research programs, Shield AI's target is the US. By developing fully autonomous piloting integrations for any type of aircraft, the company aims to future-proof the US military without the need for bespoke aircraft design. It has generated massive amounts of funding to support continued scaling and R&D efforts.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 14 rounds)
Mar 2026
$1.5bn
SERIES G
Mar 2026
$500m
LATE VC
Total funding: $3.0bn
Company benefits
- Excellent Medical Coverage
- Mental Health Employee Assistance Program
- Paid Parental Leave
- Pet Insurance
- Flexible Work Hours
- Gym Discount (San Diego)
- Onsite Gym (DC)
- Free Parking
- Competitive Compensation
- 401K Services and Match
- Stock Benefits
Company HQ
Core-Columbia, San Diego, CA
Leadership
Ryan Tseng
(Co-Founder & President)Experience as CEO, CTO and Founder of WiPower from 2006 to 2010. Technical Lead for Wireless Power Program for Qualcomm from 2010 to 2013.
Brandon Tseng
(Co-Founder & President)Naval Officer for the US Navy from 2009 to 2015.
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