SRE - Platform Engineer

DroneUp, LLC is a technology company built on years of complex airspace management and UAS operations experience with a foundation that uniquely positions us to deliver autonomous airspace management solutions that serve both regulators and operators.

It is a company with a vision to make autonomous flight great for communities, great for business, and great for the world. Yet more than visionaries; we have the tools, instruments, focus, and expertise to execute while utilizing a “People Matter Most” mentality.

Our founder envisioned a massive, untapped opportunity to leverage autonomous flight that would revolutionize how the world may "pitch" and "roll" in the future. To start, we have harnessed the power of airspace technology, analytics platforms, and drone services to transform business operations. Our long-term mission is to be “Safe and Be Exceptional” while building and deploying the world's most accessible drone ecosystem.

Knowing that our mission critical success comes directly from the people we bring onboard, we strive to provide opportunities for our employees to learn, grow, and go beyond the normal Field of View! Come fly with us as our team goes through our checklists that will “Inspire Fast Action” and take an entire industry to new heights. “Be a Person Others Want to Follow!”

About the role

• DroneUp is seeking an SRE - Platform Engineer who will focus on ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our internal and client-facing IT infrastructure and developer platform. This role combines strong operational expertise with platform engineering principles, emphasizing uptime, incident response, and observability. The ideal candidate will drive SRE best practices, including SLO/SLI management, monitoring, and proactive system improvements, while collaborating with the broader platform engineering team. Our principles include self-service, security by default, automation, and building resilient systems for software delivery at scale.

What you'll do

• Broad domain architect for the internal developer platform and all cloud engineering
• Drive architecture for tooling or in-house software
• Mentor other platform engineers to drive strong engineering practices
• Enablement of platform engineering technical capabilities in our internal client teams in software engineering
• Peer with the senior architects and engineers in software engineering
• Architecture and engineering focused on GCP environment
• Architect and oversee GKE cluster operations and workload management
• Provide feedback to others and participate in peer reviews / pair programming
• Drive the broad adoption of Test Driven Development through designing, development, and debugging unit and integration tests for new and existing infrastructure and code
• Continuous curiosity of existing implementations and new technologies and sharing with the team
• Practice continuous improvement across all job areas and personally / professionally
• Clearly communicate with platform engineering teams and other stakeholders and provide technical direction while doing so
• Stay current with platform changes and third-party libraries. Proactively investigate better solutions for current solutions
• An understanding of Open Telemetry and true observability and the difference between it and monitoring and logging
• Grow the engineering culture towards a high-performing team
• Practice the arts of self-service, least privilege and security by default in all solutions
• Define and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets
• Lead incident response, including on-call rotations, root cause analysis, and post-mortem reviews
• Implement and optimize monitoring, alerting, and observability systems for system reliability
• Collaborate on capacity planning and performance optimization to ensure high availability
• Other duties as assigned

Our Tooling Stack Includes but is Not Limited to:

• Github / Github Actions
• GCP
• Kubernetes (via GKE), Helm, Docker
• GSM Secrets Management (part of GCP)
• Terraform
• Honeycomb
• Grafana stack
• Prometheus

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field or 8+ years experience as a software engineer
• Proficiency in kubernetes. Optional: CKA, CKAD
• Extensive experience in Unix / Linux
• Polyglot and proficiency in multiple languages (ideally: Golang, NodeJS, Python, HCL and more)
• Knowledge of multi-cloud environment, including GCP, AWS, and Azure (familiar with at least two of these environments)
• Experienced in using git in trunk-based development models
• Experience in use of feature flagging in infrastructure and runtime (k8s)
• Experience with backend database technology is a plus, including supporting and performance enhancements
• Advanced experience working with and creating public cloud resources in Terraform or other infrastructure as code tools
• Experience participating in a 24/7 on-call schedule without supervision and successfully resolving issues without escalation
• Experience using Open Telemetry for observability as well as other monitoring tools such as datadog, new relic and others
• Good understanding of networking and routing principles
• Experience in dockerizing applications and orchestrating them with kubernetes
• Familiarity with security configuration for web/api services (SSL, Access control)
• Experience with JIRA or other work tracking systems. Ability to resolve tickets according to priority order and collaborating with the Technical Product Manager to adjust priorities
• Excellent documentation details, using Confluence or similar tooling - this could include support notes, runbooks, ADRs, etc
• Familiarity with creating an end to end CI/CD pipeline using various tools with artifact storage
• Familiarity with use of MacOS as a desktop and predominantly CLI interfaces
• Experience in a “product mindset” by understanding stakeholder needs, priorities and business value
• Experience with security compliance frameworks including FedRAMP, NIST, and SOC2
• Proven experience in SRE practices, including incident management and reliability engineering
• Familiarity with monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or Honeycomb for observability
• Experience with chaos engineering, load testing, or reliability testing frameworks

Security Responsibility Statement: Employees are expected to provide a high level of security to any personal or private information accessed as part of their work, whether at a DroneUp facility or remotely. This includes participating in security training, remaining sensitive to individual rights to personal privacy, and complying with company policies. Employees who have access to sensitive data that is protected by regulation, such as HIPAA, or by contract, such as credit card data, must comply with any additional requirements dictated by the governing regulations or associated contracts.