District Partners is supporting one of the most advanced engineering organizations in the country. Their teams build AI-native, software-defined systems across autonomy, robotics, networking, and distributed mission platforms. They’re widely considered the gold standard for modern national security engineering, and this role supports a flagship program requiring deep technical rigor and real-world impact.

This Site Reliability Engineer joins a mission-focused Platform Discovery team working at the intersection of cloud, networking, autonomy, and large-scale system integration. The work is fast-moving, deeply technical, and tied directly to operational outcomes.

Candidates who tend to excel here typically bring a strong academic foundation and professional experience gained inside high-performing engineering environments.

You’ll take on reliability, tooling, deployment, and operational challenges across highly complex distributed systems. This is hands-on engineering work ensuring systems run at scale, in secure environments, with real operators depending on them.

SREs on this team operate with a practical, “whatever it takes” mindset. You’ll make sound engineering tradeoffs, build scalable mechanisms, and partner closely with software, data, and operations teams to support live mission environments.

What You’ll Do:

• Improve operational capabilities through automation, tooling, and large-scale deployment mechanisms
• Lead post-mortems and drive continuous improvement across technical teams
• Diagnose and resolve issues across cloud, networking, robotics-adjacent, and distributed system architectures
• Build frameworks and processes that support reliable delivery as the program scales
• Design and implement solutions using modern infrastructure technologies
• Partner with internal and external engineers to identify and solve technical challenges

What You Must Have:

• Active Top Secret clearance
• STEM degree or equivalent hands-on technical training
• 5+ years in operations, SRE, systems, infrastructure, or platform engineering
• Strong experience with Terraform, Ansible, and IaC workflows
• Proficiency with AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Proficiency with Docker and Kubernetes
• Ability to navigate, debug, and support large, complex distributed systems
• Demonstrated success in technically rigorous environments where expectations are high and quality matters

Preferred Experience:

• Experience in reputable engineering organizations known for strong technical standards
• Ability to drive alignment across diverse engineering and operational teams
• Experience deploying into secure, air-gapped, or hardened environments
• Background supporting autonomous or distributed mission systems
• Strong data-driven root-cause analysis capabilities
• Ability to read or debug Go, Python, Rust, or C++
• Experience designing scalable systems with clear implementation paths

Location: Washington, DC (onsite)

Clearance: Active Top Secret required

Comp: $160K–$220K base + bonus + equity (total comp typically up to ~250K depending on experience)