Fielded Site Reliability Engineer

Title: Fielded Site Reliability Engineer Location: Waltham, Massachusetts, United States

About the Team

The Imaging team builds and fields state-of-the-art camera and sensor systems deployed to solve real security challenges for the United States and its allies. We work across the full stack, from bare-metal hardware and firmware to networked services and cloud integrations, and we own our systems all the way through to the field. When something breaks in a deployed environment, we fix it.

About the Role

We're looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to join the Imaging team. This is not a product development role, and it isn't a traditional cloud-SRE role either. You are the frontline for keeping fielded imaging systems alive: the person field personnel and customer-support escalations turn to when a deployed system isn't behaving. You'll be the second SRE on a small, high-trust team, working directly with our lead, with real room to shape how Imaging reliability and support operate as we scale.

The work is varied and often ambiguous. You might spend a morning triaging a networking failure on a system being stood up at a remote site, an afternoon walking a field operator through a sensor calibration over the phone, and the back half of a week hardening a runbook so the next person never has to solve that problem live again. When a fielded system misbehaves, the root cause could be anywhere in the stack--and you're the one who narrows it down.

If you get energy from diagnosing live systems under pressure, being the reason a deployment stays up, and turning recurring fire-drills into durable fixes, this role is built for you.

What You'll Do

Own fielded system reliability. You are responsible for the health and uptime of deployed imaging systems. When issues arise--whether the root cause is in the network, the calibration, an upgrade, or the sensor hardware itself--you triage, diagnose, and drive resolution.

Run point on escalations. You'll be first and second line of response for issues coming through our support channels and Anduril's customer-support pipeline (Tier 0 to Mission Success / Product Operations to SRE), acting as the deep-expertise backstop the rest of the funnel escalates to.

Turn fires into runbooks. Recurring issues shouldn't be solved live twice. You'll build and maintain runbooks, diagnostics, and self-service tooling that reduce repeat problems and shrink the support load over time.

Hold the boundary with engineering. You own everything short of a code fix. When an issue turns out to be a genuine software defect, you'll cleanly reproduce it, document it, and hand it off to the Mission Software Engineers--protecting their focus by keeping frontline support where it belongs.

Feed reliability back into the product. You'll turn what you learn in the field into signals that make our systems more supportable--better observability, safer upgrades, more graceful failure.

Travel expected approximately 20% of the time for field support and deployment windows.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 3+ years in SRE, DevOps, field/systems engineering, or production support of deployed hardware/software systems--with real ownership after systems ship, not just standing them up
• Strong Linux fundamentals, including comfort troubleshooting real networking issues (IP, routing, VPNs, connectivity in constrained or field environments)
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve issues across system boundaries (networking, services, hardware interaction) without always having full visibility into every component
• Comfortable owning a structured on-call rotation, including scheduled after-hours and weekend coverage
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to run a remote troubleshooting session with a non-technical operator and document what happened
• Eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret clearance

Preferred

• Experience supporting fielded or deployed systems, not just development environments
• Experience with fielded hardware or sensor systems (EO/IR, optical, or similar), including familiarity with sensor calibration
• Scripting for diagnostics and automation (Python, Bash, or similar)
• Familiarity with Nix or NixOS--uncommon, but valuable on our stack
• Familiarity with systemd service management and observability practices on Linux
• Familiarity with incident tooling (PagerDuty or equivalent)

What Makes Someone Successful Here

The people who thrive in this role share a few traits that don't always show up on a resume:

They close loops. When they pick up a problem they own it until it's resolved, not until it's someone else's problem.

They stay calm under pressure. A system down in the field with an operator waiting is a high-stress moment. They work the problem methodically instead of reacting.

They communicate proactively. They don't wait to be asked for a status update. They document what they find, share what they learn, and keep the people who need to know informed.

They're comfortable with ambiguity at the stack boundary. When a device behaves unexpectedly in the field, the root cause could be anywhere. They have a methodology for narrowing it down systematically rather than guessing or waiting for someone else to have the answer.

They know where the line is. They own frontline support fully, and they know when an issue is a true code-level defect that belongs with engineering--handing it off cleanly rather than either sitting on it or tossing it over the wall half-formed.