Site Reliability Engineer at Picogrid
El Segundo, CA
$170,000–$195,000
Jul 20, 2026
El Segundo, CA
Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
The first SRE hire at a defense-focused startup, this role is responsible for production reliability across both cloud infrastructure and a fleet of hardware edge devices deployed in the field. Day-to-day work covers owning SLIs/SLOs, maintaining an observability stack (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry), leading incident response and postmortems, and encoding reliability practices into infrastructure-as-code. It suits an experienced SRE comfortable with Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, and IoT/edge fleet operations in fast-moving environments.
Senior level · 3+ years · Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA · Full-time
Pay in the description: $170,000–$195,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
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 640 people in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 190–960
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.
What the occupation pays Median $164,459 (middle half $130,334–$195,752). This posting is about at that midpoint.
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 (6)
The SOC classification is a genuine judgment call. This SRE role is the company's first, and the JD emphasizes building observability infrastructure, encoding reliability into infrastructure-as-code, and owning the full observability stack — signals pointing toward 15-1252 (Software Developers). However, a meaningful portion of the work is operating and managing existing systems (Kubernetes cluster ops, edge fleet management, incident response), which could support 15-1244. 15-1252 was chosen as primary because the role is explicitly expected to build and define systems and encode reliability into IaC.
The title 'Site Reliability Engineer' carries no explicit seniority level word, so the title states no level. The 3+ years requirement and scope (first SRE, owning production reliability end-to-end) support a Senior classification.
An active security clearance is listed under Preferred Qualifications, so it is not treated as a hard gate. The Export Control section restricts applicants to US persons but does not require a clearance.
IoT/edge fleet operation experience is listed under Required Qualifications and is captured via the NVIDIA Jetson preferred skill (the specific hardware named appears only under Preferred); the general edge fleet requirement is reflected in the SLI/SLO and Kubernetes must-have skills.
High-availability database deployment experience is required by the JD but names no specific database technology, so it is omitted from the skills list per the rule against emitting generic concepts with no named tool.
Overlay/mesh networking (Nebula, WireGuard, Tailscale) appears under Preferred Qualifications.
Read the full posting
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