Security Clearance, Location, and Onsite Notice:This is a hybrid role, requiring regular work on-site at customer locations in Arlington, VA - about 50/50 on-site vs remote.
If you are not currently within commuting distance, you must be willing to relocate (note that Onebrief will provide relocation assistance).
ActiveSecret Clearance required.About The RoleWe're hiring a Site Reliability Engineer to join our Infrastructure & Security team. You'll work closely with product engineers, fellow SREs, security, and customer success.
This is an SRE role for someone who's comfortable in application code. Much of the reliability and performance work happens in the codebase (primarily TypeScript), so you'll fix problems at the source rather than working around them in the infrastructure. You'll be a first line of support for our mission-critical deployments across on-prem DoD and AWS environments, and what you learn in the field will feed directly back into the product.
You'll ship code that makes Onebrief more stable, faster, and easier to deploy and operate. The work sits at the seam between engineering and operations, and it's weighted toward engineering.
About YouYou treat reliability as a feature, not an afterthought, and you'd rather fix a problem in the code than route around it. You understand the full software development lifecycle (design, review, testing, release) and you know where reliability fits into each step.
You're comfortable reading and writing application code, and you're just as happy dropping into a kubectl shell to triage a production issue. You turn failure modes into guardrails, and you think monitoring, alerting, and clear runbooks are part of building software, not extra credit.
You mentor others and push a culture of blameless postmortems. You work naturally with product and platform teams, helping them move fast without breaking things by giving them the tools, tests, and observability that make quick recovery real.
What You'll DoYou'll help make our production application reliable, scalable, and secure by improving the software itself, not just the systems it runs on. Day to day that looks like:
- Improving the application: Work directly in the codebase (primarily TypeScript) to fix reliability and performance problems at the source. You'll partner with product engineers on design decisions, review code with reliability and security in mind, and treat "make the app better" as a first-class part of the job rather than something you hand off.
- Building observability that developers actually use: Design and run our monitoring, logging, and alerting (Prometheus, Loki, Alloy, Grafana). The goal is alerts and dashboards tied to real application behavior, so teams catch issues before users do.
- Owning reliability targets: Define and measure SLIs and SLOs, wire up alerting that feeds them, and be the person who can say what "reliable" means for our systems and prove it with data.
- Leading incident response: Act as incident responder, and incident commander when needed. Run blameless post-mortems (AARs) that find the actual root cause and turn it into a code or process fix so it doesn't happen again.
- Automating away toil: Spot the repetitive operational work and write software to kill it. Share what works with other teams, including those running in air-gapped environments, and help them get production-ready.
What We Look For- An active Secret clearance
- 5+ years in software engineering, SRE, or a related role, with real time spent writing and shipping application code
- Strong TypeScript (or comparable modern language experience with willingness to work primarily in TypeScript)
- Solid grasp of the full SDLC: design, code review, testing, release, and how reliability fits into each stage
- Experience with incident response, root cause analysis, and turning findings into lasting fixes
- A collaborator who works well across product, platform, and DevOps teams and shares context openly
Technical expertise- Application development in TypeScript (Node and/or a modern front-end framework)
- CI/CD: building and maintaining pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins)
- Testing and quality practices as part of the delivery process
- Comfort with at least one of Python, Go, or Bash for tooling and automation
- Working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes (enough to debug and deploy, not necessarily to stand up clusters from scratch)
- Networking fundamentals and secure configuration basics
Bonus points (nice to have)- Observability: Grafana stack, ELK, or Datadog
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) and cloud experience (AWS or AWS GovCloud)
- Kubernetes cluster design and operations
- Designing meaningful SLIs/SLOs with error budgets for distributed systems
- GitOps practices and toolchains
- DoD environments and compliance frameworks (RMF, STIGs, ICD 503)
- Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
- On-prem virtualization (VMware, Proxmox, Nutanix, Hyper-V)
- Relevant certs (AWS DevOps Engineer, CKA/CKAD)
