Site Reliability Engineer

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. We believe the coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement as exponential progress in AI converges with central advances in other fields to accelerate innovation. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive progress. We have committed a $3.5B endowment to that work and fit the form of our support to the function it serves: grants, investments, and in-house research programs. We accept meaningful risk in the research we back and expect some of it to fail because transformative ideas are rarely the ones already proven. Our projects, and the foundation itself, operate like high-velocity startups, with a high performance bar and competitive compensation to match. We are searching for leaders who are compelled by the challenge of driving high-impact change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated. You can read more about our mission, vision, and programming at astera.org/vision.

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to own the digital infrastructure that powers our research.

This includes compute resources that we rent from third parties, container registries, and dashboards. The main objective is to make sharing these resources easy and efficient, ensuring the infrastructure is reliable and accessible to the right people.

This role spans a broad spectrum of activities:

• Compute Access: Ensure easy and efficient access to compute resources for our researchers.

• Resource Visibility: Provide clear visibility into resource utilization and cluster health.

• Auto-Scaling: Enable automatic scaling of compute resources based on demand.

• Access Management: Ensure the right people have access to the right resources.

• Reproducibility: Drive towards deterministic deployments and reproducible research environments.

• Process Automation: Automate operational processes where it makes sense to increase efficiency.

• Current stack: Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, Tailscale, Python, Grafana, Prometheus, and Talos Linux. We're not religious about any of it.

• Ownership: You are comfortable being the person accountable when the cluster is unhealthy or capacity is tight.

• Systems Intuition: You understand how schedulers, containers, networking, storage, and hardware interact. You can reason about failure modes and design systems that degrade predictably.

• Operational Rigor: You value observability, reproducibility, and clear operational boundaries. You leave systems in a state that other engineers can understand, operate, and debug without you.

• Pragmatism: You can support experimental research workloads without forcing everything into a rigid "production" mold. You know when to stabilize and when to allow controlled chaos to speed up discovery.

• This role is in-person in Emeryville, CA.

• Visa sponsorship may be available for qualified candidates.