Senior Software / Site Reliability Lead Engineer

Role Description

This position involves owning the reliability of AI services and ensuring that they meet high standards across applications. Key responsibilities include:

• Cross-pod reliability standards: Set the reliability bar and ensure it is met consistently across applications. Collaborate with Functional SREs to connect technical reliability metrics to business-side outcomes.
• SLOs and reliability metrics: Own definitions of service level objectives for every AI service that goes to production. Establish error budgets and use them to drive engineering decisions.
• Monitoring and observability: Implement and maintain the full observability stack — logging, metrics, tracing, and dashboards. Design and manage alerting infrastructure that effectively identifies real problems.
• Incident response: Own on-call procedures, escalation paths, and incident management end-to-end. Lead post-incident reviews and maintain the reliability improvement backlog.
• Production Readiness: Define and enforce criteria that determine whether an AI service is ready for production.
• Toil elimination: Identify and automate repetitive operational tasks.

What You Won't Own:

• Infrastructure provisioning — IT provides the infrastructure; you define what's needed and validate it works.
• Business process decisions or backlog prioritization.
• Business-side reliability metrics — you partner with the Functional SRE on those, but they own that domain.

What Makes This Role Different:

• AI services have unique failure modes that traditional applications don't.
• You will build monitoring for problems that most SRE teams have never encountered.
• You are applying SRE principles from scratch — there is no existing SRE practice to inherit.
• Your production readiness criteria directly determine whether AI services go live.
• You operate across projects simultaneously, maintaining consistent standards.
• Your software engineering background allows you to engage directly with development teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, plus 8 years of experience; or Master’s degree plus 6 years of experience.
• Production SRE or DevOps experience — you have owned the reliability of systems that real users depended on.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, CloudWatch, or similar.
• Strong scripting and automation skills — Python, Bash, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar).
• Experience with containerized environments — Docker, Kubernetes, container orchestration at scale.
• Experience defining and managing SLOs, error budgets, and incident response procedures in production.
• U.S. citizenship required. Department of Defense Secret security clearance is required at time of hire.

Requirements

• Production SRE or DevOps experience — you have owned the reliability of systems that real users depended on.
• Software engineering fundamentals — you can read, write, and meaningfully review production-quality code.
• Software design experience — you have participated in or led design reviews, defined service interfaces or APIs.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, CloudWatch, or similar.
• Strong scripting and automation skills — Python, Bash, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar).
• Experience with containerized environments — Docker, Kubernetes, container orchestration at scale.
• Experience defining and managing SLOs, error budgets, and incident response procedures in production.

Benefits

• Remote — 100% telework.
• 9/80 schedule.
• Defense industry experience is not required.
• Salary range: USD $142,696.00 - USD $158,303.00 /Yr.

Company Description

General Dynamics Mission Systems (GDMS) engineers a diverse portfolio of high technology solutions, products, and services that enable customers to successfully execute missions across all domains of operation. We value trust, honesty, alignment, and transparency, and offer highly competitive benefits.