Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Company Description

Minerva Defense is a dynamic startup dedicated to advancing technology and innovation in the service of national security and prosperity. With a focus on cutting-edge solutions, the company is driven by a mission to address complex challenges and support critical operations. Minerva Defense fosters a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence to achieve impactful results. The organization is headquartered in Huntsville, AL, a hub for defense and aerospace industries.

We offer extremely competitive benefits, including:

• Low deductible BCBS Gold Health insurance, dental, vision
• ADD, Life, and Short Term and Long Term disability coverage
• Automatic 5% contribution to 401k
• Professional development and education program with generous cost sharing
• Equity incentive
• Generous bonus opportunities
• A culture made to reward and celebrate doers

Role Description

The Senior SRE roles own the reliability of systems they don't write. They bring the experience to spend most of their time preventing fires rather than fighting them. They remain in the on-call rotation and are effective incident responders, but their primary contribution is the foundational work that raises the reliability floor for everyone. Working primarily with: Kubernetes infrastructure, GitOps patterns, progressive delivery, rollback automation, capacity planning, and disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Our Senior SREs are less focused on keeping platforms running and more focused on resilience and reliability outcomes - building the internal capability that lets SREs and dev teams ship with confidence. Their success is measured by the same standard, at a higher bar: most of their time is in planned, high-leverage work. 

Type: Full-Time

Location: Dayton, OH, Huntsville, AL

Contingent on winning the ICAM Collection Development and Support TORP

Start Date: On or after June 5th, 2026

Expected Salary: $130K-$180K

Potential Sign on Bonus: $10k

Relocation Incentive

Required Qualifications 

• 3-7  years of experience in Operations, Sys Admin, DevOps, or Software engineering 
• Bachelor’s Degree in CS, Computer Engineering, or related technical field 
• US Citizenship & Must have or be able to obtain a Top Secret Clearence  
• Systems thinking – understanding how systems fail together, blast radius, and more 
• Observability Fundamentals – not just the 3 signals, but knowing why and how to use telemetry to optimize services and engineering quality of life 
• Software engineering – building automation & non-trivial APIs, git workflows, leading code reviews 
• Linux/networking fundamentals 
• Strong Communication, Collaboration, and Organizational Skills 

Specialty Skills: (2 or more) 

• Platform & Infrastructure - Kubernetes, ArgoCD/GitOps, DR, capacity planning 
• Observability - OTel standards, Grafana/Perses, Tempo, Clickhouse, VictoriaMetrics 
• Automation & Toil Reduction - scripting, CI/CD, runbook automation, “DevOps” 
• Developer Enablement - instrumentation SDKs, SRE practice onboarding 
• Data & Alerting - dashboard quality, alert design, anomaly detection 

Desired Qualifications 

• SRE Certifications from The DevOps Institute, AWS Solution Architect, or similar 
• Hands-on experience with: Python, Go, Kubernetes, Argo CD, GitLab/GitHub, Jenkins, Docker, Locust/Gatling, Prometheus, Grafana/Perses