Senior Site Reliability Engineer, AI Platforms

Who we are

At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer's needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful.

Our values:

Listen first

• We are experts in product practices but lifelong learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand.

Learn why

• We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients.

Love your craft

• We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success.

We're looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to embed with a fast-growing AI developer platform company. You'll help their customers run the platform on their own infrastructure: deploying it, keeping it healthy at scale, and making upgrades boring. This role suits someone who has run stateful, self-hosted software in Kubernetes for demanding customers and wants to point that experience at agentic AI.

Key Responsibilities:

Self-Hosted Platform Reliability

Deploy, upgrade, and operate a containerized AI platform in customer-owned Kubernetes environments using Helm and GitOps (ArgoCD)

Own the health of stateful backing services in-cluster, including Postgres, Redis, and ClickHouse

Troubleshoot deployments across varied customer setups, including private networking, air-gapped, and regulated environments

Turn recurring customer issues into better Helm charts, runbooks, and documentation

Site Reliability Engineering

Define and track SLIs and SLOs for self-hosted deployments

Lead incident response and blameless post-mortems

Do capacity planning and performance tuning for high-volume trace and event data

Reduce toil through automation

Infrastructure & Cloud

Build and maintain infrastructure with Terraform across AWS, GCP, and Azure (EKS, GKE, AKS)

Build CI/CD pipelines that test upgrade paths and catch regressions before customers do

Apply security best practices: secrets management, RBAC, network policy, SSO

Required Qualifications:

6+ years in SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering

Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Helm in production

Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD or Flux)

Experience operating stateful services in Kubernetes (Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse, Kafka, or similar)

Proficiency with Terraform or similar IaC tools

Experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and its managed Kubernetes service

Solid scripting and automation skills (Python, Go, or Bash)

Comfortable working directly with customers to debug their environments

Preferred Qualifications (Exceptional Candidates)

Experience supporting self-hosted or on-prem deployments of a commercial software product

Experience with air-gapped or regulated environments (FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 2)

Familiarity with observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Honeycomb)

Exposure to LLM applications, agent frameworks, or LLM observability and evaluation tools

What Sets Exceptional Candidates Apart

You've written or maintained Helm charts that other teams depend on

You've scaled ClickHouse or another analytical database under heavy ingest

Contributions to open-source infrastructure or AI tooling

Strong technical writing; your runbooks get used

What to know before you apply

This role will require being in the Chicago office 3 days per week and up to 20% travel within the United States.

Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of the employment Visa process at this time.

The Chicago base salary range for this role is $165,000 - $200,000.