Site Reliability Engineer
US$165,000 – US$270,000 / yr base salary
Posted 15 Sep 2026
Advertised as “ Sr. Site Reliability Engineer, AI Infrastructure (Starshield)”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Level
- Level 3
- Expected experience
- 5+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
| Base salary | US$165,000 – US$270,000 / yr |
|---|
SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars.
SR. SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER (STARSHIELD)
At SpaceX we’re leveraging our experience in building rockets and spacecraft to deploy the Starshield constellation. Starshield is the world’s largest US government satellite constellation and is tasked with providing immediate access to critical intelligence and national security data for the US government anywhere on the globe. We design, build, test, and operate all parts of the system – receivers that allow users to connect within minutes, and the software that brings it all together. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of Starshield's global impact and are looking for best-in-class engineers to help us further our ambitious goals.
As an engineer focused on Starshield's software and GPU infrastructure, you will design, operate and scale the infrastructure which supports critical national security missions. These positions cover a variety of areas ranging from Site Reliability Engineering, Developer Operations, and GPU platforms. You will develop automation to deploy and manage on-premise compute resources, create highly scalable and maintainable software products, and directly collaborate with engineering across the board.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Manage GPU/CPU infrastructure deployments to Top Secret data centers
- Manage and provide support for GPU as a service for external customers on bare metal hardware and virtualized platforms
- Design, validate, and productize solutions for AI clusters (100k+ GPU scale)
- Develop automation to deploy and manage on-premise Kubernetes\AI clusters, and operating systems
- Deploy and manage core infrastructure such as databases, monitoring and distributed storage
- Closely collaborate with AI engineers to create highly scalable, operable, and maintainable products
- Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services -- from inception and design, through deployment, operation and refinement
- Monitoring and alerting supporting systems to have high availability
- Identify areas for improvement and create innovative solutions that enable high system availability
- Mentor and train junior engineers
- As a senior engineer you must lead the team to technical excellence – your decisions guide the team
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems/IT, or an engineering discipline and 5+ years of professional experience with Linux operating systems; OR 7+ years of professional experience in software, DevOps, or site reliability engineering in lieu of a degree