Senior Site Reliability Engineer

About the role

You own the reliability, performance, and capacity health of Lambda's production storage fleet across all data centers, operating behind Lambda's own software-defined data plane. You investigate and resolve storage-related incidents using deep telemetry, logs, and performance profiling - from a single flapping NIC to a cluster-wide rebuild. You design and maintain self-healing automation for common failure modes such as drive replacement, node swaps, rebuild monitoring, and capacity rebalancing. You automate ticketing, escalation, and incident-response workflows so the team spends less time on repetitive triage and more time on root cause. You partner with Storage Engineers, Fleet Orchestration, and Release Engineering to automate the deployment and configuration of software-defined storage across new and existing sites using tools such as Ansible and Jenkins. You work with hardware and networking teams to diagnose low-level I/O and network issues - NIC errors, RDMA/RoCE/InfiniBand fabric health, and path multipathing - that surface as storage-layer symptoms. You participate in an on-call rotation supporting Lambda's storage fleet, with a focus on driving down MTTR and building the automation that keeps you from getting paged for the same thing twice. You build and maintain monitoring, dashboards, and alerting for storage performance, capacity, and hardware failures.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Own the reliability, performance, and capacity health of Lambda's production storage fleet across all data centers, operating behind Lambda's own software-defined data plane.
• Build and maintain monitoring, dashboards, and alerting for storage performance, capacity, and hardware failures.
• Investigate and resolve storage-related incidents using deep telemetry, logs, and performance profiling - from a single flapping NIC to a cluster-wide rebuild.
• Automate ticketing, escalation, and incident-response workflows so the team spends less time on repetitive triage and more time on root cause.
• Design and maintain self-healing automation for common failure modes: drive replacement, node swaps, rebuild monitoring, and capacity rebalancing.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines for storage automation and tooling.
• Partner with Storage Engineers, Fleet Orchestration, and Release Engineering to automate the deployment and configuration of software-defined storage across new and existing sites using tools such as Ansible, Jenkins etc.
• Work with hardware and networking teams to diagnose low-level I/O and network issues - NIC errors, RDMA/RoCE/InfiniBand fabric health, path multipathing - that surface as storage-layer symptoms.
• Participate in an on-call rotation supporting Lambda's storage fleet, with a focus on driving down MTTR and building the automation that keeps you from getting paged for the same thing twice.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience operating Linux systems in production or HPC environments, with hands-on storage experience at scale on scale-out or software-defined platforms (e.g., CEPH, Lustre, GPFS, or similar).
• Hands-on experience operating Software-Defined Storage (SDS) platforms at scale, including integrating with their management and data-plane APIs.
• Strong incident-response instincts: comfortable owning a production storage incident end to end, from first alert through root cause to postmortem.
• Working experience with monitoring and logging platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Datadog, or SumoLogic - including building dashboards and alert/pager routing for multiple audiences.
• Working experience with Kubernetes (GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD, Helm/Kustomize) and hands-on troubleshooting.
• Working experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, BuildKite), containerization (Docker/Podman), and systems programming in Python or Go.
• Working experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Solid understanding of core storage protocols across file (NFS, SMB), object (S3), block (NVMe-oF/TCP), and structured (vector DB, SQL) storage.

Nice to have

• Experience with cutting-edge software-defined storage solutions such as VAST or Weka.
• Enterprise storage expertise in solutions such as NetApp, Dell PowerScale, GPFS, or Lustre.
• Experience writing or operating Kubernetes CSI drivers.
• Experience with SR-IOV and virtualization (KVM/QEMU).
• Experience with GPUDirect Storage, RDMA, InfiniBand, or RoCE networking.
• Familiarity with NIC-level diagnostics (ethtool, mlxlink) and fleet-wide operations tooling (clush or similar).
• Contributions to open-source storage projects.

Practical notes

• This position requires presence in our San Francisco or San Jose office location 4 days per week; Lambda's designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.

Salary Range Information

The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description.

About Lambda

Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast

Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA