Senior SRE Engineer

About us

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production.

Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more. We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

The role

We're looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our growing platform engineering team. You'll be embedded in the teams building and operating Encord's core infrastructure, ensuring our platform is performant, reliable, observable, and scalable.

You will lead the planning and execution of efforts needed as we grow from our customer base from hundreds to thousands of AI teams worldwide, and the volume of AI training and supervision data managed by our platform from TBs to PBs of data.

You'll drive a culture of performant and resilient software through individual contributions and collaboration with multiple squads.

What You'll Do

• Performance & Capacity — Profile and optimise services handling large-scale data pipelines; perform capacity planning for storage and compute-intensive workloads. Work with squads to establish performance benchmarks and expectations

• Collaboration — Partner closely with backend and ML engineers to improve deployment pipelines (CI/CD), review infrastructure changes, and champion reliability best practices.

• Reliability & Availability — Define and own SLIs/SLOs/SLAs for critical services; build alerting, runbooks, and incident response processes; lead postmortems with a blameless culture.

• Infrastructure & Cloud — Design, deploy, and maintain cloud infrastructure on GCP and AWS; manage Kubernetes clusters, networking, and storage at petabyte scale.

• Automation & Tooling — Work to improve developer productivity and guide and review automation and tooling efforts across the engineering group.

• Observability — Instrument services with distributed tracing, logging, and metrics (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog or similar); build infrastructure, define best practices and work with each squad to ensure every service is observable before it goes to production.

What We're Looking For

• Experience on hands-on SRE, DevOps, platform engineering experience or similar in a production environment.

• Strong fundamentals in designing, building and maintaining resilient distributed and/or high performance systems

• Solid understanding of networking, operating systems and database technologies

• Experience with observability fundamentals — metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.

• Comfortable with on-call rotations and incident management.

Tech stack

• We are technology agnostic at Encord and not looking for experience across all of these — as long as you're open to learning, please apply.

  • Backend: Python and Rust

  • Frontend: TypeScript and React

  • Deployment: Kubernetes

  • Infrastructure: GCP

Why Encord

• Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup

• Strong in-person culture — most of the team works from our London office 4+ days/week

• 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays

• Annual learning & development budget

• Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe

• Daily company lunches

• Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites

Operating principles

High agency

You see something broken, you fix it or find the person who can. We celebrate the people who solve 90% of a problem before anyone asks.

Build with care & urgency

We bear-hug the customer. Former founders and people from fast-moving, high-stakes environments thrive here.

Self-aware & hungry

We stay warm, self-aware, and genuinely hungry. We elevate our peers, and ego doesn't last long.

Invent in real time

We move toward the ambiguity. We’re pragmatic, resourceful, energized by the fact that there's no playbook.

If you're looking to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who push you to be better, we'd love to meet you.