How to apply for Sr Staff Site Reliability Engineer

About Archer

Archer is pioneering the future of urban air mobility with electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, aiming to reduce carbon emissions and transform city transportation. As a climate-focused startup with a bold mission, you'll work on cutting-edge technology that directly impacts sustainability and urban living.

About the role

As a Sr Staff SRE at Archer, you'll architect and maintain the cloud-native infrastructure powering our eVTOL development and operations. Your work on Amazon EKS, observability, and CI/CD will directly ensure the reliability of systems critical to flight safety and real-time data pipelines.

A typical day

Your day might start with a stand-up to review system health dashboards and ongoing incidents. You could then collaborate with software engineers to design a new EKS cluster for a flight test, write Terraform modules, or optimize a Kafka pipeline to reduce latency. Afternoons often involve code reviews, mentoring, and on-call rotation for production issues.

Who Archer is looking for

• Has 12+ years in SRE/DevOps with deep hands-on experience in Amazon EKS and Kubernetes, including cluster management, auto-scaling, and security.
• Expert in observability stacks like Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK, with proven ability to design dashboards and alerts for complex distributed systems.
• Strong background in data pipelines (Kafka, Airflow, Spark) and CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, ArgoCD), with a focus on automation and reliability.
• Proficient in Python and Bash scripting, with experience in Docker and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) for reproducible deployments.

Tips for this application

• Highlight specific projects where you scaled Amazon EKS clusters to handle high throughput or reduced incident response times.
• Quantify your impact with metrics like 'reduced deployment failures by 30%' or 'improved system uptime to 99.99%'.
• Mention experience with real-time data pipelines (Kafka/Spark) and how you ensured data reliability in production.
• Tailor your resume to emphasize 'reliability engineering' over 'DevOps' to match the SRE focus.
• Include a link to your GitHub or blog showcasing automation scripts or Kubernetes manifests you've built.

What to cover in your cover letter

["Express passion for sustainable aviation and Archer's mission to decarbonize urban transport.", 'Demonstrate deep expertise in Amazon EKS and observability tools, with examples of solving production issues.', 'Show leadership in driving reliability improvements, such as implementing SLOs or incident management processes.', 'Highlight your experience with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code to accelerate development cycles.']

Research before applying

• Read about Archer's eVTOL aircraft (Maker) and their technology partnerships (e.g., United Airlines).
• Review Archer's engineering blog or any public talks on their infrastructure.
• Understand the regulatory landscape for eVTOLs (FAA certification) and how reliability impacts safety.
• Check Archer's recent funding rounds and growth plans to gauge team size and culture.

Likely interview topics

Based on the job description, expect questions about:

• Design a highly available Kubernetes architecture for a real-time data pipeline using EKS, Kafka, and Spark.
• How would you set up monitoring and alerting for a distributed eVTOL telemetry system?
• Walk through a complex production incident you resolved, focusing on root cause analysis and prevention.
• Explain your approach to CI/CD security: secrets management, image scanning, and compliance.
• How do you balance reliability with velocity when deploying to production?

Common mistakes to avoid

• Downplaying the importance of data pipelines; Archer relies on real-time data for flight operations.
• Focusing too much on generic DevOps without emphasizing reliability, SLOs, and incident response.
• Ignoring the startup context—Archer needs engineers who thrive in fast-paced, cross-functional environments.