Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (Backend)

Viam helps companies unlock the power of AI, data and automation in the physical world. We provide a single platform for engineers of all disciplines to solve problems together and build solutions that are fast and future-proof. Viam powers solutions across robotics, food and beverage, climate tech, marine, industrial manufacturing, and more. Founded in 2020 by former MongoDB co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz, Viam is headquartered in New York City.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our SRE/Infrastructure team. This team supports the reliability and performance of our systems across multiple platforms. They also play a key role in unblocking our customers and allowing them to ship quickly and confidently. 

An exciting aspect of this role is that the tooling you'll develop is widely used; customers leveraging the Viam platform will rely on these tools to build and deploy their own pluggable hardware drivers, software services, and ML models through the Viam Registry, enabling them to connect new machines and capabilities to the platform. If you thrive on solving challenging technical problems, collaborating cross-functionally, and driving meaningful improvements, we want to hear from you!

In this role, you will:

• Manage the full lifecycle of our cloud infrastructure, including multi-region availability planning, cost optimization, and failover strategy, while codifying resources in Terraform and empowering engineers with operational autonomy.
• Design better developer testing infrastructure to ensure seamless hardware and cross-platform support and resilience in edge-specific scenarios like flaky connectivity.
• Help shape our incident response strategy and enhance observability practices across the organization
• Own and improve our developer platform, including CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and developer environments
• Partner with engineering teams to prototype and integrate AI/ML capabilities, like LLM-driven code generation, code assistant or smart CI checks, into our developer tooling to eliminate repetitive work and surface real-time insights that boost productivity
• Partner with other teams to support complex customer projects and deliver robust cross-platform solutions
• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering teams, Solutions Engineering, and company leadership

We’re looking for someone who:

• Is a strong programmer, familiar with or open to learning Go
• Has a systems-thinking mindset and strong debugging skills across networking, filesystems, permissions, and real-world edge environments 
• Has deep systems experience with Linux (especially ARM/aarch64), and comfort working across Windows and macOS
• Has experience with cloud infrastructure platforms (e.g. GCP, AWS) and building CI/CD & build pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions)
• Is comfortable with infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Can work independently and drive cross-team initiatives in a high-context environment
• Writes clearly and documents tools and workflows for others to build on

Bonus points if you have:

• Familiarity with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry
• Worked in IoT or other hardware/software environments
• Experience with WebRTC, gRPC, or real-time communication systems
• Background on a Developer Productivity, Platform Engineering, or Internal Tools team

The starting salary for this role is $220,000/year.