Senior Site Reliability Engineer

About Firsthand

Firsthand has built the first AI-powered Brand Agent platform, transforming the way marketers and publishers engage consumers through their own AI agents, anywhere online.

While most AI applications in marketing and advertising focus on back-office automation, the Firsthand Brand Agent Platform™ powers front-line consumer engagement. Operating across both owned properties and paid media, Firsthand's Brand Agents make a company’s expertise accessible in real time, adapting to consumers’ interests and guiding them towards the information they need to take action. Central to the platform is Lakebed™, the company’s AI-first data and knowledge rights management system that ensures brands retain full ownership and control of their expertise.

Firsthand is led by Jon Heller, Michael Rubenstein, and Wei Wei, whose previous ventures helped build the foundations of modern digital advertising. Backed by Radical Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Aperiam Ventures, and Crossbeam Venture Partners, Firsthand is shaping the future of AI-driven consumer engagement.

Firsthand is headquartered in NYC, with team members working together in-office three days a week.

About the Role

We’re at the stage of recruiting founding engineers! As a highly motivated site reliability engineer, you will join a small crew to build, automate, monitor, and maintain cloud infrastructure for our web, data, and machine learning teams. You will:

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather requirements and translate them into technical specifications.

• Develop, deploy, maintain, and improve cloud infrastructure in the GCP ecosystem.

• Maintain and improve GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows.

• Help monitor, alert, and address root causes for incidents and document fixes.

• Document decisions regarding technology choices, best practices, and processes. 

• Build tools that facilitate team productivity and prioritize developer experience.

• This role is open to remote candidates who are experienced and can work in the US time zones.

Who You Are

• 4+ years of professional work experience as a software engineer with at least 2 years spent in an SRE role.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals. Proficiency in a few programming/scripting languages (ie. Python, Shell, JavaScript, etc.)

• Proven experience authoring and maintaining IaC(Infrastructure-as-Code) with Terraform and using IaC to deploy resources in GCP, AWS, or Azure. 

• Experience with container management architectures such as Docker and Kubernetes.

• Experience managing monitoring and alerting tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, etc.

• Strong networking knowledge (routing, firewall rules, nat policies, load balancing).

• Experience in building and maintaining CI/CD platforms and supporting agile engineering teams.

• Familiarity with relational databases such as Postgres.

• Strong communication skills. Good at writing concise documents.

• Desire and passion to work in an early-stage startup. Comfortable handling ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.

How to Apply

If you are ready to embark on an exhilarating journey at the forefront of AI, seize this incredible opportunity and apply here. We eagerly anticipate hearing from you!

Note: Compensation and equity will be market-competitive for well-capitalized, early stage startups and will be discussed during the interview process.