Forward Deployed Site Reliability Engineer

Responsibilities

Reliability Engineering

• Define, track, and report on SLIs and SLOs for platform services running in the customer environment.
• Use error budgets to drive reliability conversations with the engineering team, translating operational data into prioritized engineering work.
• Identify and eliminate toil: build automation for repetitive operational tasks within the constraints of the secure environment.
• Conduct post-incident reviews, own root cause analysis, and drive durable fixes in partnership with the engineering team.

Observability & Incident Response

• Own the observability posture for the on-site deployment — dashboards, alerting thresholds, and log pipelines using the LGTM stack (Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir).
• Lead incident response on-site: triage, containment, coordination with engineering team, and customer communication.
• Maintain and continuously improve runbooks for operational procedures and emergency response protocols.
• Serve as the on-call anchor for the customer environment, with clear escalation paths to the engineering team.

Deployment & Infrastructure Operations

• Work with the customer deployment team to get platform stood up and updated within the restricted environment.
• Manage containerized services (Docker, Docker Compose) across deployment lifecycle — configuration, updates, rollbacks.
• Apply and validate Terraform-based infrastructure changes within the enclave, in coordination with the DSO engineer.
• Perform capacity planning and flag scaling requirements to the engineering team before they become incidents.

Customer Liaison & Engineering Feedback

• Serve as the primary technical interface between the government customer and engineering team — translating operational requirements, constraints, and issues in both directions.
• Represent the operational environment accurately in engineering discussions.
• Partner with the DevSecOps engineer on compliance, logging, and audit requirements specific to the customer environment.
• Provide technical guidance and support to customer stakeholders on system behavior and troubleshooting procedures.

Requirements

Must Have

• 5+ years of professional experience in site reliability engineering, production operations, or a closely related infrastructure role.
• Proven experience defining and tracking SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets in a production environment.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Docker Compose, and AWS (EC2, ECS, RDS, VPCs, security groups) in production deployments.
• Solid Linux/Unix systems administration skills; productive in constrained environments where GUI tooling may be limited or unavailable.
• Experience with Terraform for infrastructure provisioning and configuration, working within DSO-provided policy guardrails.
• Experience with the LGTM observability stack or equivalent (Grafana, Loki, Prometheus/Mimir, distributed tracing).
• Strong incident response experience: you've led responses, written post-mortems and runbooks, and shipped the preventive fix.
• Scripting proficiency in Python or Bash for operational automation, with familiarity in Go a plus; experience with PagerDuty or equivalent on-call tooling.
• Experience working in or directly supporting government or defense environments, including air-gapped or enclave deployments.
• Must possess and be able to maintain a TS/SCI security clearance with appropriate polygraph.
• U.S. citizenship required.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for customer engagements and operational support.

Nice To Have

• Experience with NATS or similar pub/sub messaging systems in production.
• Background in cyber operations, intelligence systems, or signals environments.
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, SysOps, or DevOps Engineer).