> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt.

# Senior Site Reliability Engineer, AI Platforms

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ee79a029387546d9

Focused posts a senior FDE role to build what the customer runs in Denver, CO, at $160,000–$195,000 base, below the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. This senior SRE role embeds with an AI developer platform company to make customer-managed, self-hosted Kubernetes deployments reliable across diverse and demanding environments. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026.

- [Focused](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/focused)

Posted Nov 3, 2026 by Focused · open on Greenhouse as of Nov 8, 2026

**$160,000–$195,000** Denver, CO Hybrid, 3 days a week in office

This senior SRE role embeds with an AI developer platform company to make customer-managed, self-hosted Kubernetes deployments reliable across diverse and demanding environments.

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2Fee79a029387546d9&placement=top)
- [View posting at Focused](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/focused/jobs/8178383003)

Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so.

## At a glance

### Posted base pay

$160K–$195K Below the median

Midpoint $178K · median $190K

This job $160K to $195K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K.

### The work

Builds what the customer runs

Balance **Mostly building**

Project stages

1. Pre-sales (not covered)
2. Proof of concept (not covered)
3. Implementation
4. Operations

Travel **Up to 20%**

- **Coding**: Configuration only

- **Builds for**: External customers

- **Level**: Senior

- **Role**: Individual contributor

### What they ask for

Experience

- **6+ years** SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering

Background

- **Software engineering**

Visa

- **No visa sponsorship**

### Do you meet what the posting states?

The posting asks for 6+ years. How many do you have?

The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now?

The job is in Denver, CO. Could you work there?

The posting says no visa sponsorship. Do you need one?

Which of these have you used in production?

Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent.

[What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths)

## Conditions

- **Location**: Denver, CO

- **Work arrangement**: Hybrid, 3 days a week in office

- **Remote work restrictions**: Denver office 3 days per week; travel within the United States

- **Visa sponsorship**: Not available

- **Travel**: Up to 20%

- **Pay**:

## More like this

[Focused](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/focused) Integrates and configures it

### [Senior Site Reliability Engineer, AI Platforms](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/5598fd62ad462af3)

Chicago, IL Hybrid 4d ago

$165,000–$200,000

[EY](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/ey)

### [EY-Parthenon - Strategy and Execution - Growth Platforms - Software Engineer - Sr Assoc/Consultant](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/db242f263e15ea06)

New York, NY · Atlanta, GA · +12 more Hybrid 2mo ago

$130,000–$185,000

[Amazon (incl AWS)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/amazon-incl-aws)

### [Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), AWS Forward Deployed Engineering, US Government](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/91438c07da633c6c)

Denver, CO · Jessup, MD · +4 more 3d ago

$143,700–$213,800

- [Other jobs at Focused (11)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/focused)

## The job description from Focused

Posted by Focused on Nov 3, 2026

### Who we are

At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer's needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful.

### Our values

- *Listen first* • We are experts in product practices but lifelong learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand.
- *Learn why* • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients.
- *Love your craft* • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success.

We're looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to embed with a fast-growing AI developer platform company. You'll help their customers run the platform on their own infrastructure: deploying it, keeping it healthy at scale, and making upgrades boring. This role suits someone who has run stateful, self-hosted software in Kubernetes for demanding customers and wants to point that experience at agentic AI.

### Key Responsibilities

### Self-Hosted Platform Reliability

- Deploy, upgrade, and operate a containerized AI platform in customer-owned Kubernetes environments using Helm and GitOps (ArgoCD)
- Own the health of stateful backing services in-cluster, including Postgres, Redis, and ClickHouse
- Troubleshoot deployments across varied customer setups, including private networking, air-gapped, and regulated environments
- Turn recurring customer issues into better Helm charts, runbooks, and documentation

### Site Reliability Engineering

- Define and track SLIs and SLOs for self-hosted deployments
- Lead incident response and blameless post-mortems
- Do capacity planning and performance tuning for high-volume trace and event data
- Reduce toil through automation

### Infrastructure & Cloud

- Build and maintain infrastructure with Terraform across AWS, GCP, and Azure (EKS, GKE, AKS)
- Build CI/CD pipelines that test upgrade paths and catch regressions before customers do
- Apply security best practices: secrets management, RBAC, network policy, SSO

### Required Qualifications

- 6+ years in SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering
- Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Helm in production
- Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD or Flux)
- Experience operating stateful services in Kubernetes (Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse, Kafka, or similar)
- Proficiency with Terraform or similar IaC tools
- Experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and its managed Kubernetes service
- Solid scripting and automation skills (Python, Go, or Bash)
- Comfortable working directly with customers to debug their environments

### Preferred Qualifications (Exceptional Candidates)

- Experience supporting self-hosted or on-prem deployments of a commercial software product
- Experience with air-gapped or regulated environments (FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 2)
- Familiarity with observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Honeycomb)
- Exposure to LLM applications, agent frameworks, or LLM observability and evaluation tools

### What Sets Exceptional Candidates Apart

- You've written or maintained Helm charts that other teams depend on
- You've scaled ClickHouse or another analytical database under heavy ingest
- Contributions to open-source infrastructure or AI tooling
- Strong technical writing; your runbooks get used

### What to know before you apply

- This role will require being in the Denver office 3 days per week and up to 20% travel within the United States.
- Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of the employment Visa process at this time.
- The Denver base salary range for this role is $160,000 - $195,000.

[View posting at Focused](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/focused/jobs/8178383003)

## About Focused

Focused is a software consultancy that builds custom applications and AI agents integrated with clients' existing systems, and works alongside client engineering teams.

Late-stage private · 50–100 people

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- [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior)
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