{"id":99520,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-principal-site-reliability-engineer","title":"Principal Site Reliability Engineer","company":{"id":38666,"name":"Shifter","domain":"shifter.no","url":"https://alion.io/company/shifter","size_band":"1-10","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"BambooHR","truth_index":null},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Trondheim, Norway"],"countries":["NO"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":78000,"max_usd":202000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":909},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Incident Management","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Vespa","optional":false},{"name":"Buildkite","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":true},{"name":"Google Workspace","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"Jira","optional":true},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true},{"name":"Service Desk","optional":true},{"name":"Slack","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-02T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T10:08:45Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":137,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":137},"description":"Does it sound interesting to work on an open source platform managing the data and real-time search and inference for some of the largest companies in the world? Would you thrive on keeping large, globally distributed systems reliable, fast, and observable - and on building the practices and tooling that let a small team operate at massive scale? If so, we want you to join our team at Vespa.ai as a Principal Site Reliability Engineer!\nAbout Vespa.ai:\nVespa.ai is a team of passionate builders. We maintain and develop the Apache 2.0 licensed open-source AI search platform Vespa.\nVespa is a fully featured search engine and vector database. It supports vector search (ANN), lexical search, and structured data search, all in a single query. Integrated machine-learning model inference enables the application of AI to make sense of data in real time. Together with Vespa’s proven scalability and high availability, this empowers to create production-ready search applications at any scale and with any combination of features. Our users and customers are #1 in e-commerce, content, and financial services globally, and are used by companies such as Perplexity, Spotify, Yahoo, Wix, and many more.\nIn addition to our open-source platform, Vespa.ai develops and runs Vespa Cloud, a robust SaaS offering that allows businesses to harness the power of our technology with ease.\nAt Vespa.ai, we are extremely focused on automating everything we do to grow fast and maintain high quality. In all roles, we scale through technology, not simply by adding larger teams. We take pride in being small, nimble, and the most productive.\nPosition overview\nAt Vespa.ai, we embrace DevOps as a company culture, seeking to solve technical problems with automation and code rather than repetitive manual effort. For our Vespa Cloud production systems, we have had this mindset from day one.\nWe are seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to join our team and help keep Vespa Cloud reliable, fast, and observable at global scale. This is a senior individual contributor role on the team that operates and improves our production systems. You will also help shape and develop our approach to SRE and DevOps as we grow. We are looking for a strong engineer who earns influence through contributions and has the ambition to take on greater responsibility over time. You will also participate in our 24x7 on-call rotation, approximately every third to fourth week.\nAt our Trondheim office, we work office-first: you will be based on-site most of the time, with the flexibility to work from home/remotely when needed, as agreed with your manager.\nResponsibilities\nHelp ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of Vespa Cloud production systems running globally at scale.\nParticipate in a 24x7 on-call rotation (approximately every 3rd-4th week), lead incident response, and drive blameless postmortems through to durable fixes.\nHelp define and track SLOs/SLIs, and build proactive alerting, capacity planning, and remediation strategies.\nDesign and improve observability - metrics, logging, and tracing - across a large fleet.\nEliminate operational toil by solving problems with automation and code rather than manual effort.\nContribute to, and help shape, our SRE and DevOps practices and culture as the organization grows, sharing knowledge and mentoring across the team.\nWork with the rest of the Vespa.ai developing team on reliability, scalability, and architecture.\nQualifications\n5-10 years building and operating large-scale production systems, with deep SRE/DevOps experience.\nSolid programming skills in Java, Python, Go, or similar languages.\nGood understanding of sound software engineering principles and practices.\nExperience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).\nSolid understanding of networking, operating systems, distributed systems, and security principles.\nProven incident management and on-call experience.\nA track record of influencing technical direction and improving how teams work - not just executing tickets.\nExcellent problem-solving and analytical skills, and the ability to lead through influence as well as work independently.\nDesired Skills\nExperience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Tofu, Spacelift, etc.\nFamiliarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK).\nExperience with CI/CD tooling such as GitHub Actions, Buildkite, etc.\nExperience operating data-intensive or stateful systems at scale.\nExperience defining SLOs and establishing reliability programs.\nAmbitions beyond pure SRE - an interest in growing, over time, into a technical leadership role.\nSome of Our Tools and Services\nJumpCloud, Google Workspace, and Slack\nGitHub Enterprise Cloud (including GitHub Actions)\nJira Cloud and Jira Service Desk\nStrongDM, Grafana, Spacelift, and Buildkite\nAWS, GCP, and Azure\nWhy Join Us:\nOpportunities for professional growth and development as part of one of Europe’s most exciting start-ups!\nBe part of a cutting-edge team working on innovative search and recommendation technology.\nWork on a team where we don’t believe in silos between engineers; there aren’t “developers”, “ops people”, and “sysadmins”. We’re all engineers solving problems the smart way together!\nCompetitive salary and benefits.\nNote: Vespa.ai is an equal-opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We believe in fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment where every team member has the opportunity to make a significant impact.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5550,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT News & Tech Media"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-06-02T00:00:00Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.294,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":137,"expected_fill_days":24,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-principal-site-reliability-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-principal-site-reliability-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T12:37:07Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":16761,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":38666},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=38666"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fshifter-principal-site-reliability-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fshifter-principal-site-reliability-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fshifter-principal-site-reliability-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/shifter-principal-site-reliability-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fshifter-principal-site-reliability-engineer"}]}