Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Arlington, VA) - Secret Clearance Required - Relocation Provided
Software Engineering
United States · Remote
Consequential Work. Dedicated People.
About Onebrief
Onebrief builds collaboration and AI-powered workflow software for military planning and operational coordination.
Today, many critical planning workflows still rely on fragmented systems, static documents, and disconnected tools that make collaboration and decision-making unnecessarily difficult. Onebrief brings modern software, AI, and real-time collaboration into those environments, helping teams operate with greater clarity, coordination, and adaptability in situations where decisions carry real-world consequences.
We are a distributed team of builders from military, operational, and technology backgrounds who care deeply about improving how important work gets done. Some team members work remotely, while others work directly alongside customers in operational environments around the world.
Founded in 2019, Onebrief is backed by leading investors including General Catalyst, Battery Ventures, Insight Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Human Capital. Valued at more than $2 billion, we continue to invest in product innovation, AI capabilities, and team growth.
Security Clearance, Location, and Onsite Notice:
This role requires regularly working on-site at customer locations in Arlington, VA.
If you are not currently within commuting distance, you must be willing to relocate (note that Onebrief will provide relocation assistance).
Active Secret Clearance required.
About The Role
We're hiring a Site Reliability Engineer to join our Infrastructure & Security team. You'll work closely with product engineers, fellow SREs, security, and customer success.
This is an SRE role for someone who's comfortable in application code. Much of the reliability and performance work happens in the codebase (primarily TypeScript), so you'll fix problems at the source rather than working around them in the infrastructure. You'll be a first line of support for our mission-critical deployments across on-prem DoD and AWS environments, and what you learn in the field will feed directly back into the product.
You'll ship code that makes Onebrief more stable, faster, and easier to deploy and operate. The work sits at the seam between engineering and operations, and it's weighted toward engineering.
About You
You treat reliability as a feature, not an afterthought, and you'd rather fix a problem in the code than route around it. You understand the full software development lifecycle (design, review, testing, release) and you know where reliability fits into each step.
You're comfortable reading and writing application code, and you're just as happy dropping into a kubectl shell to triage a production issue. You turn failure modes into guardrails, and you think monitoring, alerting, and clear runbooks are part of building software, not extra credit.
You mentor others and push a culture of blameless postmortems. You work naturally with product and platform teams, helping them move fast without breaking things by giving them the tools, tests, and observability that make quick recovery real.
What You'll Do
You'll help make our production application reliable, scalable, and secure by improving the software itself, not just the systems it runs on. Day to day that looks like:
Improving the application: Work directly in the codebase (primarily TypeScript) to fix reliability and performance problems at the source. You'll partner with product engineers on design decisions, review code with reliability and security in mind, and treat "make the app better" as a first-class part of the job rather than something you hand off.
Building observability that developers actually use: Design and run our monitoring, logging, and alerting (Prometheus, Loki, Alloy, Grafana). The goal is alerts and dashboards tied to real application behavior, so teams catch issues before users do.
Owning reliability targets: Define and measure SLIs and SLOs, wire up alerting that feeds them, and be the person who can say what "reliable" means for our systems and prove it with data.
Leading incident response: Act as incident responder, and incident commander when needed. Run blameless post-mortems (AARs) that find the actual root cause and turn it into a code or process fix so it doesn't happen again.
Automating away toil: Spot the repetitive operational work and write software to kill it. Share what works with other teams, including those running in air-gapped environments, and help them get production-ready.
What We Look For
An active Secret clearance
5+ years in software engineering, SRE, or a related role, with real time spent writing and shipping application code
Strong TypeScript (or comparable modern language experience with willingness to work primarily in TypeScript)
Solid grasp of the full SDLC: design, code review, testing, release, and how reliability fits into each stage
Experience with incident response, root cause analysis, and turning findings into lasting fixes
A collaborator who works well across product, platform, and DevOps teams and shares context openly
Technical expertise
Application development in TypeScript (Node and/or a modern front-end framework)
CI/CD: building and maintaining pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins)
Testing and quality practices as part of the delivery process
Comfort with at least one of Python, Go, or Bash for tooling and automation
Working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes (enough to debug and deploy, not necessarily to stand up clusters from scratch)
Networking fundamentals and secure configuration basics
Bonus points (nice to have)
Observability: Grafana stack, ELK, or Datadog
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) and cloud experience (AWS or AWS GovCloud)
Kubernetes cluster design and operations
Designing meaningful SLIs/SLOs with error budgets for distributed systems
GitOps practices and toolchains
DoD environments and compliance frameworks (RMF, STIGs, ICD 503)
Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
On-prem virtualization (VMware, Proxmox, Nutanix, Hyper-V)
Relevant certs (AWS DevOps Engineer, CKA/CKAD)
Notice to Third Party Recruitment Agencies
Please note that Onebrief does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies. In the absence of an executed Recruitment Services Agreement, there will be no obligation to any referral compensation or recruiter fee. In the event a recruiter or agency submits a resume or candidate without an agreement Onebrief explicitly reserves the right to pursue and hire those candidate(s) without any financial obligation to the recruiter or agency. Any unsolicited resumes, including those submitted to hiring managers, shall be deemed the property of Onebrief.