Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Airbyte· startup· Computer Software· Oct 16, 2026 · 12d ago
San Francisco
Hybrid
Full-time
Senior
$196K–$235K
7+ years exp
Job description
Airbyte is the data and action layer for AI agents. We give agents fast, accurate, authenticated access to business data across hundreds of sources, so they can discover the entities that matter, reason over real-time context, and take action in the systems they read from, not just observe them.
We started as the open-source standard for data movement and proved the economics of data integration at scale: hundreds of connectors, thousands of companies, and, since 2020, have raised $181M from leading investors including Benchmark, Accel, Altimeter, Coatue, and Y Combinator. As our CEO Michel Tricot puts it, "the last ten years were all about structured data. The future is all about context." We're now building that context infrastructure for production-grade agents on the same open foundation, as agents become the primary consumers of enterprise data.
Our mission is unchanged: make data available and actionable to everyone, everywhere. That everyone now includes AI agents.
THE ROLE:
You'll be one of two infrastructure and reliability specialists on the Data Replication team, a full-stack product team running millions of sync jobs a week that power thousands of data use cases across multiple regions and clouds. You'll build and maintain the infrastructure, set reliability standards, drive down incidents, and make it easier and safer for engineers to ship.
Expect to spend roughly 30 to 50% of your time in backend application code, and the rest on infrastructure and reliability. When the fix belongs in the application, you'll ship it there yourself, and you'll build features alongside product engineers. We believe every abstraction leaks, so the best engineers work up and down the stack. You're equally comfortable in a Terraform file, a Kubernetes cluster, a service's codebase, and a postmortem doc. And with two of you in the room, we want someone who will challenge a design, not just implement it.
We expect engineers here to actively use AI as a force multiplier: agentic tools to automate toil, augment incident response, and build smarter internal tooling. If you're not already doing this, you should be excited to start. We care as much about how you work as what you build. Trust, directness, and craftsmanship matter here.
WHAT YOU’LL DO:
- Own the infrastructure underpinning the Data Replication platform: Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, networking, and cloud resource configuration across AWS and GCP.
- Work across the stack: ship backend features and fixes in application code alongside product engineers, not just the infrastructure underneath them.
- Improve performance and efficiency at scale, from bursty job scheduling to right-sizing compute.
- Help us ship safely into customer-managed environments, where Airbyte runs in infrastructure we don't control.
- Evolve observability, alerting, and anomaly detection, with an eye toward LLM automation.
- Build AI-augmented release and internal tooling: canary deployments, progressive rollouts, automated release qualification, and rollback automation.
- Set the infrastructure bar for the team: build self-serve tooling, write runbooks, and coach engineers to own more of their stack.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED:
- 7+ years in infrastructure, platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps.
- Hands-on ownership of Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform in production environments.
- Deep experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) and on-call operations.
- Experience with CI/CD pipeline ownership and developer tooling.
- Experience shipping changes to backend services in [language], not only infrastructure code, and the appetite to do more of it.
- Strong design judgment, and the confidence to challenge infrastructure decisions with data.
- Fluency with AI tools: LLMs and agentic frameworks to automate, debug faster, and reduce toil.
- A startup-ready mindset: comfortable with ambiguity, moving fast, and owning problems end to end.
NICE TO HAVE:
- Data pipelines, replication systems, or ETL/ELT platforms.
- Control plane / data plane architectures or internal developer platforms.
- Shipping software customers run in their own environments (Helm charts, upgrade paths, varied configurations).
- Experience with Airbyte, CDKs, or connector-based architectures.
LOCATION:
- Onsite 4 days/week in San Francisco, CA
WHY YOU'LL LOVE WORKING AT AIRBYTE:
At Airbyte, we believe great work happens when people feel supported, trusted, and empowered to grow. Our market-leading Total Rewards package is designed to help you thrive professionally and personally. Our benefits and perks include:
• Flexible PTO with a culture that encourages at least 25 days off annually
• 16 weeks fully paid parental leave for all parents
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Professional development budget, conference sponsorship, and book reimbursement
• Commuter benefits and monthly internet reimbursement
• Breakfast and lunch in our San Francisco office
• A collaborative, in-person culture focused on learning, growth, and impact
If you find this role exciting, we encourage you to apply even if you think you don’t meet all of the requirements!
We are not accepting agency submissions or recruiting firm support for this role. Unsolicited resumes will not be considered.
Airbyte is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, genetic information, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, familial status, domestic violence victim status, veteran or military status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state or local laws. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Airbyte is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. Please let us know if you need assistance or accommodations due to a disability.
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Keywords to mirror
airestkubernetesci/cdawsgcpllm
- Platform
- ashby
- Effort
- quick
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