---
title: 'Platform Site Reliability Engineer at Specter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/platform-site-reliability-engineer-specter-san-francisco-c9mhsvjd32qq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Platform Site Reliability Engineer at Specter

- **Company:** Specter
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/ab171ab2-8811-4fef-8d63-b3e2e6bb2703

## Job description

## COMPANY BACKGROUND

Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.

Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

Soon, we will build robots, trained on top of the data we collect, to take action in these environments as well.

Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

## THE ROLE

We’re hiring a Platform Site Reliability Engineer to own the operational health, reliability, and scalability of the cloud platform behind our connected sensor fleet.

This is a high-ownership role at the intersection of site reliability and platform engineering. You’ll operate and improve our Kubernetes-based infrastructure, manage cloud resources through Terraform, strengthen observability and incident response, and build the systems that allow our engineering teams to deploy safely and move quickly.

You’ll work primarily across our AWS infrastructure and Kubernetes environments while partnering with application, AI, embedded systems, and fleet teams. You’ll help resolve production issues when they occur—and then improve the platform so they are less likely to happen again.

## RESPONSIBILITIES

Reactive — Triage & Recovery

- Debug production issues across Kubernetes clusters, Linux systems, AWS infrastructure, networking, and application workloads.
- Lead incidents from detection through recovery, coordinating across teams when failures span multiple parts of the system.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and follow incidents through to durable fixes.

Systems Builder — Close the Loop

- Build, operate, and improve our Kubernetes platform and the AWS infrastructure supporting it.
- Manage production infrastructure with Terraform, including reusable modules, automated validation, and safe change workflows.
- Reduce operational toil through automation while improving deployment tooling, CI/CD, and developer workflows.

Observability Owner — Platform Visibility

- Design and improve observability into system health, functionality, and performance through logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting across Kubernetes workloads and AWS infrastructure.
- Define meaningful service-level indicators and objectives, and close telemetry gaps before they become incidents.
- Develop runbooks, incident-response procedures, post-incident reviews, and operational readiness standards.

## QUALIFICATIONS

- Strong Linux systems knowledge and experience diagnosing production systems.
- Hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production, including networking, storage, resource management, upgrades, and troubleshooting.
- Strong experience using Terraform to manage production cloud infrastructure.
- Experience with AWS, including IAM, networking, compute, storage, and EKS.
- Solid networking fundamentals, including DNS, load balancing, firewalls, VPNs, subnets, and routing.
- Experience building operational tooling and automation using Python, Go, Bash, or a similar language.
- Strong ownership during incidents and the ability to turn ambiguous failures into lasting improvements.

## NICE TO HAVE

- Experience supporting connected devices, edge computing, or on-premises infrastructure alongside cloud systems.
- Experience with CI/CD, GitOps, or Kubernetes multi-cluster environments.
- Familiarity with cloud and Kubernetes security practices.
- Experience reading firmware logs or low-level Rust or C code when debugging across the edge-to-cloud boundary.
- Experience with NixOS and managing Nix-based development infrastructure.

## About Specter

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Specter builds and deploys long-range wireless sensing networks with AI-powered real-time alerts and semantic search, creating the perception layer for the physical world.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funding stage not publicly disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: Not publicly available (likely US based on website language and job postings)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Not publicly available

## Core Business
- Primary industries: Physical security, critical infrastructure monitoring, industrial IoT, real-time situational awareness
- Target customers: Enterprise and government – including energy companies, data centers, construction firms, ports, stadiums, industrial facilities, and campuses
- Mission statement: "Creating a Software Defined Physical World" – providing instant awareness through real-time alerts, semantic search, and a map-based view of every event

## Products & Services
- **Specter Platform**: A SaaS-based physical intelligence platform that ingests data from long-range wireless sensors (video, thermal, acoustic) and applies general AI (natural language alerts) to detect events such as unauthorized access, safety hazards, equipment anomalies, fires, spills, and perimeter breaches. Features include semantic search, live and historical event detection, and complete situational awareness dashboards.
- **Long-Range Wireless Sensing Network**: Proprietary hardware and software for rugged, wide-area coverage without trenching – deployed across refineries, deserts, offshore platforms, construction sites, and other harsh environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue not publicly available; company is actively hiring (Software Engineer – Systems listing) and has a live product across multiple industry verticals.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly available
- **Growth Signals**: Recent website updates as of June 2026; expanding to new use cases (energy, data centers, construction, ports, stadiums); job openings indicate scaling engineering team.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Long-range wireless sensing** that eliminates blind spots without trenching or on-site personnel – a differentiator for remote and harsh environments.
- **General AI with natural language alerts** – users set and query alerts in plain English, lowering the barrier for security and operations teams.
- **Multimodal sensing** (video, thermal, acoustic) combined with real-time analytics for high-fidelity event detection (e.g., PPE compliance, spills, equipment theft, person-down incidents).
- Focus on **critical infrastructure** where downtime or security gaps carry high stakes, creating deep vertical-specific moats.

## Strategic Focus
- Expanding horizontal deployment across energy, data centers, construction, logistics, and campus security.
- Deepening AI capabilities through real-time semantic search and event detection to replace traditional CCTV monitoring.
- Building a “software-defined physical world” that unifies disparate sensors into a single intelligent layer.

## Why Work Here
- Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI + IoT systems that monitor real-world infrastructure at scale.
- Engineering culture likely emphasizes distributed systems, computer vision, edge computing, and high-reliability software (based on job description for Software Engineer – Systems).
- Fast-paced startup environment with a clear product-market fit across multiple verticals.
- Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated; job posting does not specify location, but likely offers flexibility.

## Sources
1. [specter.co](https://specter.co/)
2. [specter.co/product](https://specter.co/product)
3. [specter.co/industries](https://specter.co/industries)
4. [specter.co/features](https://specter.co/features)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com - Software Engineer – Systems](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/specter/fe26a690-7934-46f4-bce2-8d8c5495a0dc)

## Other roles at Specter

- [Wireless Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/wireless-software-engineer-specter-san-francisco-zvjchm89fzv0) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer - Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-applied-ai-specter-san-francisco-p7er9310dx06) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Antenna Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-antenna-engineer-specter-san-francisco-xea2760wvrkw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer — Fleet](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-fleet-specter-san-francisco-5tm2vh5drfnf) — San Francisco, CA
- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-specter-san-francisco-y4c4fq3ctm2y) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Deployment Strategist](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-deployment-strategist-specter-san-francisco-81ba238x3y8m) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Accounting Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-accounting-manager-specter-san-francisco-c560c7hymx09) — San Francisco, CA
- [Hardware Test Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-test-engineer-specter-san-francisco-0tgzpmm9kqx3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Hardware Test Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-test-lead-specter-san-francisco-m6ynp7p1kq82) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-recruiter-specter-san-francisco-rx0h3svbzxxs) — San Francisco, CA