Lead Site Reliability Engineer - Recruiting from Scratch : Job Details

Who is Recruiting from Scratch: Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire. About the client:Title of Role: Software Engineer - SRE Location: Los Angeles, CA / Austin, TX / New York, NY Company Stage of Funding: Series A Office Type: Onsite, 5 Days a Week Salary: $150,000 - $180,000 base + equity + benefits Company Description Our client is a well-funded startup supported by top-tier investors including General Catalyst, Founders Fund, and Lux Capital. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with additional offices in Austin and New York City, they are building data infrastructure and software tools for organizations working on cutting-edge technologies-such as aerospace systems, advanced robotics, and energy systems. The company's mission is to transform how engineering teams manage and analyze test data for highly complex systems like rockets, satellites, and drones. Their engineering team brings deep experience from companies like SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, and NASA, and they partner closely with both commercial clients and federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense. What You'll Do

• Drive reliability and observability improvements across large-scale distributed systems.
• Serve as a force multiplier across all engineering teams by reducing downtime, improving tooling, and freeing up senior engineers from firefighting.
• Own and evolve our incident review process, leading postmortems and embedding learnings into tools, practices, and culture across the company.
• Collaborate with teams to improve release hygiene, including: Automating release gating (e.g., ensuring code bakes in staging for appropriate windows), preventing code from stagnating in staging environments, and implementing pre-prod automated test pipelines to catch issues early.
• Build and maintain Nominal's gRPC middleware to ensure safe, observable, and performant service communication.
• Improve alerting, debugging, and monitoring to ensure production health and rapid root cause analysis.

Who You Are

• You have 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong focus on production systems and distributed architectures.
• You thrive in high-leverage roles that improve how everyone else builds, ships, and fixes software.
• You've led or played a significant role in incident response, building systems, and culture around continuous improvement.
• You're excited by complexity, not afraid of it, and you're deeply motivated to make systems safer and teams faster.

Skills that supercharge us

• Experience working on distributed systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL or other SQL databases, MongoDB/NoSQL databases, Clickhouse or other OLAP databases.
• Deep understanding of release automation, CI/CD, and code lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with gRPC and experience building shared infrastructure components like middleware.
• A systems mindset-you understand the ripple effects of a single bug and know how to design to prevent them.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base: $128-215k base depending on level and experience.
• Equity: competitive equity package.
• Benefits/Perks:

• • Fully paid Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
  • Life Insurance.
  • Unlimited PTO /sick leave.
  • 401k.
  • Free lunch, snacks, and coffee.
  • Professional development stipend.
  • Annual company retreats.
  • Cell phone reimbursement.