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Specter

Site Reliability Engineer

San Francisco
Level
Mid
Work type
On-site · San Francisco

Not stated in the posting: salary, visa.

Open. First seen 2 October 2026.

About the role

Specter's standard text

Company Background
Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.

Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

The Role
We're hiring a Site Reliability Engineer to own the operational health of our connected sensor platform — spanning a live fleet of edge hardware deployed at customer sites and the cloud infrastructure behind it.

This is a high-ownership role at the intersection of ops and platform engineering. You'll drive reliability across our sensor fleet — triaging issues in the field, building the systems that prevent them from recurring, and owning the observability that keeps us ahead of problems as we scale.

You set your own priorities across all three:
Responsibilities:
Reactive — Triage & Recovery

  • Debug and triage issues across a live fleet of diverse Linux-based sensor nodes and edge appliances deployed at customer sites.
  • SSH into field hardware to diagnose, patch, and recover systems — often with limited remote access and incomplete information.
  • Own site bring-ups end to end; be the person who gets things back online.

Systems Builder — Close the Loop

  • Build and maintain fleet management systems: OTA update pipelines, device health tracking, remote diagnostics, and lifecycle tooling.
  • Identify repeat fires and eliminate them — build tooling, pre-deployment checks, and root cause processes that prevent recurrence.
  • Automate toil relentlessly: if you're doing something twice, you should be scripting it.
  • Collaborate with embedded systems, and platform teams to define reliability and deployment requirements.

Observability Owner — Fleet Visibility

  • Design and implement observability (logging, metrics, alerting) across edge devices and cloud infrastructure (AWS).
  • Surface and close telemetry gaps; build fleet-wide visibility that enables data-driven reliability decisions.
  • Develop runbooks, incident response procedures, and participate in on-call rotations.

Qualifications:

  • Strong Linux systems administration — comfortable working over SSH in production, not just dev environments.
  • Experience with edge or on-prem hardware alongside cloud infrastructure.
  • Solid networking fundamentals: DNS, firewalls, VPNs, subnets, secure remote access.
  • Scripting or programming in Python, Go, or Bash for operational tooling.
  • Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes a plus).
  • Embedded systems experience — reading firmware logs, understanding hardware-software boundaries, and reasoning about what's happening below the OS is a meaningful edge in this role.
  • Deeper cloud experience (AWS infrastructure, IAM, networking, observability tooling) is a strong plus for owning the cloud side of the fleet.
  • Rust or C experience — we have firmware in both; being able to read and reason about low-level code accelerates triage significantly.

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

Bash · IAM

Rare in Specter's other 30 open postings.

Standard for DevOps / SRE / cloud roles

AWS · Docker · Kubernetes · Linux · Python

Common in DevOps / SRE / cloud postings at any company.

76% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Specter's standard text, folded away below.

Read against Specter's other open postings on this site.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 22 open in Engineering. 2 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in October: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

Python (15 of 22), Embedded Systems (12 of 22), Linux (12 of 22), Computer Vision (8 of 22), Rust (8 of 22), Golang (6 of 22), C (5 of 22)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Specter's own job board.

Salary context

48 other open postings titled Site Reliability Engineer state a salary: median USD 127,500 to USD 195,000 a year.

See Site Reliability Engineer salaries in San Francisco →

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