Site Reliability Engineer
RunPod is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $150k-$200k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on RunPod.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- The posting lists this role as remote.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Kubernetes, Prometheus and Grafana.
- Level classifies it as a mid-level role.
- Level lists 26 other open roles at RunPod.
AI in this role
Maintain availability, performance, and resilience for an AI developer cloud platform running frontier models.
Runpod is the AI Developer Cloud. More than one million developers, from indie researchers to teams running frontier models in production, use Runpod to experiment, train, fine-tune, deploy, and scale AI on one platform. The platform has processed more than 20 billion inference requests. We closed a $100M Series A in June 2026. We're at an inflection point for AI infrastructure, and we're building the platform the next generation of developers will depend on.
We're a small, remote-first team. We take ownership seriously, move fast, and ship work that more than a million developers rely on every day. We're looking for people who care deeply, build with urgency, and want to matter at scale.
Learn more in our CEO's funding announcement: https://www.runpod.io/blog/one-million-developers.
The Reliability team owns the availability, performance, and operational excellence of Runpod’s global platform. While infrastructure teams build the systems, the Reliability team ensures those systems remain resilient, observable, and scalable under real-world production conditions.
This team is responsible for:
Defining and enforcing reliability standards across engineering
Designing incident response processes and improving recovery times
Building observability systems and reliability tooling
Driving SLO adoption and production readiness reviews
Reducing operational toil through automation
The Reliability team works cross-functionally with Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and Support to ensure our systems remain stable and performant as we scale rapidly. We value proactive problem solving, automation-first thinking, and strong ownership of production systems.
As a Site Reliability Engineer on the Reliability team, you will focus on ensuring the stability and resilience of Runpod’s distributed platform. You will partner with engineering teams to improve system design, strengthen observability, and prevent incidents before they happen.
This role blends software engineering with production operations. You’ll work on reliability frameworks, SLO design, automation, and production hardening, reducing errors and improving performance across different services and infrastructure.
This is a high-impact role central to maintaining trust with developers running critical AI workloads on Runpod.
Your Impact
Increase platform uptime and reduce incident frequency and duration
Establish and operationalize SLIs/SLOs across services
Improve MTTR through better tooling, automation, and runbooks
Strengthen production readiness standards
Drive long-term systemic reliability improvements
You will influence how reliability is defined and measured across Runpod and help build the operational backbone of the company.
Responsibilities:
Reliability Engineering
Define and implement SLIs/SLOs for critical services
Lead incident response and coordinate cross-team mitigation efforts
Conduct blameless postmortems and ensure corrective actions are completed
Perform production readiness reviews for new services and features
Identify systemic risks and drive preventative improvements
Observability & Monitoring
Design and improve monitoring, alerting, and dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
Improve signal-to-noise ratio in alerts and reduce alert fatigue
Build internal tooling for reliability tracking and reporting
Improve visibility into GPU performance and distributed systems health
Automation & Toil Reduction
Automate recurring operational workflows
Build tools and scripts (Python, Go, Bash) to eliminate manual processes
Improve deployment safety through automation and guardrails
Strengthen CI/CD reliability and release processes
Cross-Functional Reliability Advocacy
Partner with engineering teams to improve system resilience
Provide guidance on fault tolerance, scalability, and failure handling
Contribute to architectural discussions with a reliability-first mindset
Requirements:
5+ years of experience in SRE, Reliability Engineering, or Production Engineering
Strong Linux systems and Networking expertise
Experience managing containerized production systems
Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes
Experience defining and managing SLIs/SLOs
Proven incident response and postmortem leadership experience
Strong scripting or programming skills
Experience with monitoring and alerting systems
Excellent written communication skills
Successful completion of a background check
Preferred:
Experience with GPU infrastructure or AI/ML platforms
Experience improving reliability in high-growth or large scale environments
Familiarity with GPU observability tooling
Experience with Infrastructure as Code
Experience working in startup environments
Experience building internal reliability platforms or frameworks
What You’ll Receive:
The competitive base pay for this position ranges from $150,000- $200,000 usd. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Runpod and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location
Meaningful equity in a fast-growing company- everyone on the team receives stock options — your impact drives our growth, and you share in the upside.
Generous medical, dental & vision plans
Flexible PTO- take the time you need to recharge
Most roles are remote work first with an inclusive, collaborative teams utilizing slack as the main form of internal communication
Join a passionate team on the cutting edge of AI infrastructure — where culture, learning, and ownership are at the heart of how we scale.
Runpod is committed to maintaining a workplace free from discrimination and upholding the principles of equality and respect for all individuals. We believe that diversity in all its forms enhances our team. As an equal opportunity employer, Runpod is committed to creating an inclusive workforce at every level. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We welcome every qualified candidate eligible to work in the United States; however, we are currently unable to sponsor employment visas.
How we rate this
Site Reliability Engineer at RunPod rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● 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.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where site reliability engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where observability was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where incident management was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where automation was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Site Reliability Engineering, Observability, Incident Management, Automation, and Infrastructure. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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