Senior Site Reliability Engineer Austin, TX

Apptronik is a human-centered robotics company developing AI-powered robots to support humanity in every facet of life. Our flagship humanoid robot, Apollo, is built to collaborate thoughtfully with people, starting with critical industries such as manufacturing and logistics, with future applications in healthcare, the home, and beyond.

We operate at the cutting edge of Applied AI, applying our expertise across the full robotics stack to solve some of society's most important problems. You will join a team dedicated to bringing Apollo to market at scale, tackling the complex challenges like safety, commercialization, and mass production to change the world for the better.

Apptronik builds humanoid robots. Our engineers depend on infrastructure we run ourselves: Kubernetes clusters on bare metal and in the public cloud, plus the CI/CD and observability systems behind every robot software release.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will manage and scale the Devops platform. Your job is to make it more resilient, faster to build on and safer to change as the robot fleet and the engineering team grow. You own your work end to end, from architecture decisions down to the Linux kernel, the network and the disk when something misbehaves. We are looking for a hands‑on engineer who builds systems that are reliable by design and keeps digging until they understand why something broke.

JOB SUMMARY

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage and scale our Kubernetes platform on bare metal, virtual machines and public cloud, including cluster provisioning, networking, storage and upgrades.
• Build the CI/CD infrastructure our robotics engineers ship with: build runners, remote build execution and caching, container registries, and autoscaling that adds capacity on-prem or in the cloud as demand changes.
• Design for failure: backups, multi-site recovery, and recovery drills that prove the company keeps working when a data center goes down.
• Make change safe with GitOps delivery, progressive rollouts, and automatic rollback when a release fails its health checks.
• Decide what to measure. Define SLIs and SLOs for the platform, and build the monitoring and alerting around them.
• Debug production issues across the stack, from Kubernetes down to the Linux kernel, the network and the disk, and fix the root cause so they do not come back.
• Manage infrastructure as code with tools such as Terraform, Helm and Ansible, and write tooling in Go or Python to remove manual work.
• Build security into the platform: single sign‑on and role-based access, certificate and secret management, and minimal, patched operating systems.
• Partner with robotics software teams on architecture and production readiness, and set the standards other teams build on.
• Plan capacity and cost across on-prem and cloud as the robot fleet and the engineering team grow.

SKILLS AND REQUIREMENTS

• Linux : deep knowledge of operating system internals, the networking stack, file systems, process and resource management, and performance tuning.
• Kubernetes in production : you have built clusters, upgraded them, and debugged them when networking, storage or scheduling broke.
• Hands‑on debugging : you work in a shell and reach for tools such as strace, tcpdump, ss and perf.
• Infrastructure as code and GitOps with tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm and Argo CD.
• Software skills in Go or Python. You build tools and services, not only scripts.
• Networking : TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, load balancing, VLANs and BGP.
• Observability : you know what to measure, how to alert on it, and how to set SLOs.
• You design for failure, and ask how a system will break before you build it.
• You keep digging until you can explain the root cause, and you stay clear‑headed during an outage.
• You prioritize well, work independently, and finish what you start.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hybrid infrastructure: on-prem bare metal, virtualization and SAN or NAS storage, and at least one public cloud.
• Experience building and operating CI/CD and build infrastructure at scale, such as remote build execution and caching, container build optimization and runner autoscaling.
• Experience with immutable, API‑managed operating systems for Kubernetes nodes, and with eBPF‑based networking.
• Experience operating container registries with replication and caching across sites.
• Experience planning disaster recovery and running recovery drills.
• Experience running infrastructure on both x86_64 and ARM.
• Experience with infrastructure for robotics, embedded systems or IoT device fleets.

EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of relevant experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering with a focus on hybrid cloud environments.
• A record of building infrastructure from scratch and running it reliably in production.

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS

• Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Must be able to lift 15 pounds at times.
• Vision to read printed materials and a computer screen.
• Hearing and speech to communicate.

*This is a direct hire. Please, no outside Agency solicitations.

Apptronik provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Technology Control Restrictions: As a person in this position will have access to technical data and/or computer software maintained by the Company, which includes export‑controlled technical data and/or computer software, successful applicants must be eligible under U.S. export control regulations to access such information.