Engineering

Site Reliability Engineer

Build and operate Unkey's network and compute platform. Help our engineers ship safely and keep production reliable.

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At a glance

Location
Remote · Americas time zone hours
Experience
5+ years running production EKS
On-call
Follow-the-sun rotation

About Unkey

Unkey unifies your infrastructure. Deploy APIs instantly, route traffic through global gateways, and understand usage in one place. As a rapidly growing startup, we're looking for passionate engineers who want to shape the future of developer infrastructure.

We are a fully remote and mostly asynchronous company, relying on everyone to take ownership of their work and to lead with action.

What you'll do

You'll wear many hats here: alert triage and incident response, planning EKS cluster migrations and upgrades, and contributing to product development. We're a small team, and everyone's contributions are wanted.

On the SRE side, reliability is priority number one. You'll assist product engineers with planning, capacity needs, and safe, secure rollouts. You'll also participate in a follow-the-sun on-call rotation.

This role requires working Americas time zone hours. You can be based anywhere; you do not need to live in the Americas.

Technologies

  • Cloud: AWS: EKS, EC2, IAM Identity Center, Route 53; gRPC
  • Kubernetes: Karpenter, Helm, ArgoCD, gVisor
  • Networking: Cilium (ClusterMesh, WireGuard), AWS VPC CNI, routing (OSI model)
  • Infrastructure as code: OpenTofu/Terraform
  • Security: SIEM, GuardDuty, IAM Access Analyzer
  • Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos, Loki, Tempo, Grafana, Hubble, eBPF
  • External platforms: depot.dev, Restate, PlanetScale, incident.io
  • Languages/Frameworks: Go (our services), Protobuf (buf.build), Shell, Terraform

What we're looking for

  • 5+ years running production Kubernetes (EKS).
  • On-call experience, incident management, incident response, and post-mortems.
  • AWS IAM: you can write a least-privilege policy, explain a trust policy, and read CloudTrail to see who did what.
  • You understand Kubernetes scheduling well enough to predict how kube-scheduler and Karpenter will treat a given spread constraint, PDB, or priority class.
  • Deep networking experience.

Nice to have

  • Cilium in production, especially ClusterMesh or CNI chaining via AWS VPC CNI.
  • SOC 2/ISO 27001 experience with control implementation.
  • Experience running multi-tenant platforms where customers run their own untrusted code.
  • Talos Kubernetes.

Benefits

  • Stock options/equity.
  • Inclusive Healthcare Package.
  • Flexible Time Off with a recommended 4 or more weeks per year, and paid holidays.
  • Fully remote, work from anywhere globally.
  • We provide the gear you need.

Why we may not be a good fit

We're a small, fast-moving startup, and this environment isn't for everyone. You might not enjoy working with us if:

  • You prefer well-defined structures and processes. We're building these as we go, and you'll need to be comfortable with ambiguity.
  • You're looking for extensive management oversight. We expect everyone to be self-directed and take ownership of their work. When you see something that needs fixing, we expect you to own it end-to-end and drive it to completion.
  • You want to focus solely on coding. Building a startup requires wearing multiple hats and contributing beyond your core role.
  • You have a big ego. There's no room for "rock stars" who can't take feedback or collaborate.
  • You're not comfortable with rapid change. Our priorities and approaches evolve quickly as we learn from our customers.
  • You prefer to wait for perfect information before making decisions. We often need to move fast with incomplete data.

We believe in being transparent about our environment and expectations. The right person for this role will be excited by these challenges rather than discouraged by them.

How to Apply

Send us an email at jobs@unkey.com telling us why you're excited about developer tooling and infrastructure. We'd love to hear about:

  • Your perspective on the current state of developer tools
  • Any personal pain points you've experienced that motivate you to work in this space
  • Relevant projects or systems you've built that align with our mission
  • Your GitHub profile (if you have public work you'd like to share)

We value thoughtful, genuine responses over formal applications. The best candidates are those who are genuinely passionate about empowering developers.