# Forward Deployed Site Reliability Engineer

**Company:** [Twenty](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/twenty)
**Location:** Fort Meade, MD, Arlington, VA
**Role:** DevOps / SRE
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** SLOs, Slis, Docker, Docker Compose, AWS, Terraform, Linux, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Python, Bash, Pagerduty
**Posted:** 2026-04-21

> On-site SRE ensuring reliability of mission-critical platform in air-gapped AWS environment at government site. Defines SLOs/SLIs, leads incident response, manages deployments with Docker/Terraform, and liaises between customer and engineering team. Requires 5+ years SRE experience and TS/SCI clearance.

## Job Description

## 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).

## Similar roles

- [Software Engineer, Platform & Infrastructure](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/2a4d6818-4e00-4a08-8339-aba841ed1ada) - Forus - New York, NY
- [Software Engineer, Developer Productivity](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/3d3eb78d-cb73-4b62-bef0-6c84085fdf5a) - Forus - New York, NY
- [Site Reliability Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/8def48bc-b809-4397-bd55-28b9747c1f82) - Runloop - San Francisco, CA
- [Build & Release Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/c41c87c5-6007-46e9-8648-635789c39b4a) - Applied Intuition - Sunnyvale, CA - $118k – $200k/yr
- [Software Engineer, Async Platform](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f1db6fa3-5b80-4939-86b0-39e6f0db0694) - Lyft - Seattle, WA - $118k – $147k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f5f5e747-dc9d-47b1-ade1-741bce876292
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f5f5e747-dc9d-47b1-ade1-741bce876292