Senior Staff Lead Site Reliability Engineer (R5803)

Shield AI is hiring a Senior Staff Lead Site Reliability Engineer (R5803) in San Diego, United States. It pays $190k-$280k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Shield AI.

Level's read on this job

Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this role: aI is not part of the work.
Level classifies it as a lead role.
Level lists 659 other open roles at Shield AI.

AI in this role

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 a mentor for other engineers

Full-time regular employee offer package: Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity Temporary employee offer package: Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment) Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information. ### Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

How we rate this

Senior Staff Lead Site Reliability Engineer (R5803) at Shield AI rates 35 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Senior Staff Lead Site Reliability Engineer (R5803) is an open job at Shield AI.
Level rates this role AI Level 1 of 4: Little AI.
The listed salary is $190k-$280k a year.
The role is based in San Diego, California.
The job was posted on September 3, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Shield AI. Apply on Shield AI