Senior Software / Site Reliability Lead Engineer

General Dynamics Mission Systems is a leading provider of high technology solutions for defense and scientific applications. They are seeking a Senior Software / Site Reliability Lead Engineer to own service reliability, establish metrics, and ensure production readiness for AI services. The role involves collaboration with teams to set reliability standards and implement observability practices.

Responsibilities:

• Cross-pod reliability standards . Set the reliability bar and ensure it is met consistently across applications. Collaborate with Functional SREs to connect technical reliability metrics to business-side outcomes. You own the engineering signal; together you tell the full reliability story
• SLOs and reliability metrics . Own definitions of service level objectives for every AI service that goes to production. Establish error budgets and use them to drive engineering decisions — not just measure uptime
• Monitoring and observability . Implement and maintain the full observability stack — logging, metrics, tracing, and dashboards. You will know when something is degrading before users do
• Design and manage alerting infrastructure that tells you what's wrong, not just that something is wrong. Alerts you build catch real problems; they don't cry wolf
• Incident response. Own on-call procedures, escalation paths, and incident management end-to-end. Lead post-incident reviews and maintain the reliability improvement backlog. When something breaks, you coordinate the response and ensure it doesn't break the same way again
• Production Readiness. Define and enforce the criteria that determine whether an AI service is ready for production. You are the gate between "it works in dev" and "it's ready to ship."
• Toil elimination. Identify and automate repetitive operational tasks. If a human is doing something a script could do, you fix that

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, plus 8 years of experience; or Master's degree plus 6 years of experience
• Production SRE or DevOps experience — you have owned the reliability of systems that real users depended on, not just built CI/CD pipelines
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, CloudWatch, or similar. You have built dashboards and alerts that caught real problems
• Strong scripting and automation skills — Python, Bash, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
• Experience with containerized environments — Docker, Kubernetes, container orchestration at scale
• Experience defining and managing SLOs, error budgets, and incident response procedures in production
• U.S. citizenship required. Department of Defense Secret security clearance is required at time of hire
• Software engineering fundamentals — you can read, write, and meaningfully review production-quality code. You understand how architectural and design decisions made early translate into operational problems later
• Software design experience — you have participated in or led design reviews, defined service interfaces or APIs, and pushed back on design decisions using reliability and operability as criteria
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, CloudWatch, or similar. You have built dashboards and alerts that have caught real problems