Expert: Interactive Coding, Site Reliability Engineering (Contract, Remote)

Overview

Independent contractor role working live with Patronus AI's research team on production-style reliability scenarios in a sandboxed stack, and writing up how each scenario was approached.

What you'll do

• Work through incident, debugging and infrastructure-change scenarios live with a researcher: reading dashboards and logs, writing PromQL and LogQL, fixing Helm and Kubernetes configuration, rolling back bad deploys and writing post-mortems.
• Explain your reasoning as you work, including the fixes you considered and rejected.
• Review scenarios we have drafted and say plainly what is unrealistic, too easy or underspecified.
• Help write the acceptance criteria for each scenario, including the tempting wrong moves an engineer under pressure might make.
• Write short notes after each session on how you approached the problem and what you verified.
• Work in reviewer feedback within agreed turnaround times, and flag guideline gaps or edge cases you run into.

What you'll need

• 3+ years running production systems in at least one of: incident response and on-call, platform and infrastructure, or observability, including time on an on-call rotation within the last two years.
• You did the work yourself; managing the team is not enough.
• Hands-on with Kubernetes, Prometheus and Grafana (or Datadog or New Relic).
• Hands-on with a log stack such as Loki, ELK or Splunk.
• Hands-on with infrastructure as code such as Terraform and Helm.
• Hands-on with a CI/CD system.
• Comfortable in Python, Go or Bash and at reading unfamiliar codebases.
• Able to explain your reasoning out loud while you work, in clear professional English.
• Reliable availability for scheduled live sessions and the habit of showing the evidence behind every conclusion.

Nice to have

• Experience writing runbooks, post-mortems, SLO definitions or incident training material.
• Familiarity with how AI coding agents fail on operations work.

Details

• Engagement: independent contractor, fully remote, live screen-share sessions plus short asynchronous write-ups.
• Pay: $150 per hour; the trial session is paid.
• Commitment: about 10 hours per week, 1 to 3 months to start, with extension for strong performers.
• Start: rolling.
• Location: remote from any country, with a few hours of overlap with US or EU working hours.
• All solutions, write-ups and reviews must be your own work; LLM-generated code or text is not permitted.