Contract Lead, Site Reliability Engineering — AI Accelerator Infrastructure at d-Matrix
Santa Clara, CA
$195,000–$285,000
Jul 12, 2026
Santa Clara, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A founding SRE leadership role responsible for building the site reliability engineering function from scratch at an AI inference chip company. The work spans establishing SLOs, observability, incident management, and infrastructure-as-code practices across colocation facilities, on-premises lab clusters, and multi-cloud environments, while also hiring and managing a small team of engineers and a data center technician group. Suits a deeply hands-on infrastructure leader with experience standing up SRE disciplines in organizations that previously lacked them.
Principal level · 15+ years · Remote · Contract
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 360 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer and information systems managers). range 220–540
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $178,991 (middle half $141,096–$225,584).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (10)
This role is a 6-month contract-to-hire; employment type is set to Contract to reflect the initial engagement.
The role carries genuine people-management scope — hiring and leading a team of 3–5 SREs, directing a data center technician team, and owning the SRE function end-to-end — which drives the 11-3021 classification. However, the JD repeatedly emphasizes hands-on, keyboard-level technical work (IaC, observability, incident response), making 15-1244 a credible runner-up.
Seniority is assessed as Principal: the role requires building an entire SRE discipline from scratch with org-wide technical authority, executive stakeholder ownership, and cross-functional direction-setting — well beyond a typical Senior or Staff scope despite the absence of a seniority label in the title.
The degree requirement states 'Bachelor's or Master's' but frames it as a baseline alongside equivalent experience context; however, the JD does not explicitly offer an experience-in-lieu-of-degree escape clause, so the degree requirement is set to None as the most defensible read given the 'or Master's' optionality and the 15+ years experience gate that dominates.
Prometheus and Grafana are listed as separate required skills; Datadog is listed as an alternative to Prometheus ('Prometheus, Grafana, and/or Datadog') — Grafana is retained as its own skill since it is independently named and widely paired with Prometheus regardless of Datadog.
AWS, Azure, and GCP are all named in the required section as a multi-cloud requirement; AWS is listed as primary with Azure and GCP as alternatives to reflect that any one cloud platform satisfies the gate, though the JD expects familiarity across all three.
Python and Go are listed as alternatives ('Strong Python and/or Go') per the JD's own framing.
InfiniBand, RoCE, NVLink, Slurm, LSF, FinOps, and ITIL all appear under the 'Strongly Preferred' heading and are marked accordingly.
Posting is for a contract engagement — the market benchmarks below price full-time roles, so read the comp comparison with that in mind.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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