Senior Platform & Reliability Engineer About the RoleWe're looking for a Senior Platform & Reliability Engineer to help design, scale, and improve the reliability of our infrastructure, from architectural decisions to hands-on implementation, observability, and cost optimization.
This is not a traditional ops or DevOps role. You'll work across cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, backend services, and developer tooling, making pragmatic decisions that balance product velocity, system reliability, and cost efficiency-in a fast-moving, AI-native environment.
You'll partner closely with product engineers to evolve the platform that powers OpenArt, contributing to key decisions around infrastructure architecture, improving multi-provider AI reliability, and helping us scale systems to millions of users-while raising the overall engineering bar.
What You'll Do- Define and operationalize SLOs/SLIs across critical user journeys (generation, editing, payments/credits, uploads), and use them to guide prioritization and tradeoffs.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and improve incident response (alert quality, run books, escalation paths), including leading blameless postmortems and driving follow-through on action items.
- Improve system resilience at external boundaries (AI providers, storage, etc.),including timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and fallback strategies. Build and maintain end-to-end observability (logs, metrics, traces, dashboards) so engineers can quickly understand "what broke" and "why."
- Strengthen deploy safety through CI/CD improvements, automated rollbacks, canary releases, and feature flag patterns.
- Contribute to the evolution of our infrastructure architecture, helping evaluate when to extend serverless patterns vs. adopt containerized or more managed approaches as we scale.
- Improve cost visibility and efficiency, including per-request cost attribution, caching strategies, and capacity planning.
- Act as a strong technical contributor, helping improve engineering practices, tooling, and system design decisions across the team.
What We're Looking ForCore Requirements- 5+ years building and operating production systems where reliability and scaling are important.
- Strong software engineering skills - you can build and ship production code, not just configure infrastructure.
- Experience with cloud-native systems (AWS or GCP), including serverless/event-driven architectures and at least one container-based approach (e.g., ECS/Fargate, Cloud Run, Kubernetes).
- Solid understanding of observability and reliability practices: metrics, alerting, tracing, and incident response.
- Experience designing resilient systems with external dependencies (timeouts, retries/backoff, idempotency, circuit breakers).
- Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers across different domains.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and taking ownership of problems.
Nice to Have - Experience building internal platform abstractions (e.g., job orchestration, APIlayers, workflow systems) that improve team velocity.
- Track record of improving reliability metrics (e.g., MTTR, SLO attainment, latency) or reducing infrastructure cost.
- Experience working in a startup or high-growth environment, with broad ownership across systems.
Tech Stack You'll Work WithGCP, Cloud Run, Modal, Upstash, Sentry, Amplitude, Firebase, Redis, React /Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, Python, etc.
Compensation- Competitive base salary and bonus program
- Equity - meaningful ownership in what you build
- High autonomy, high growth environment
Work Setup- Bay Area preferred (hybrid allowed)
- Visa sponsorship available
- We'll consider remote
