Site Reliability Engineer, Platform & Security

Remote, United States | Full time | Reports to Director, Engineering
Applications close November 23, 2026

Who We Are

Contrails.org is a pioneering non-profit working to establish proven contrail avoidance at scale. We are a small, focused team of scientists, engineers, and aviation experts building the science, tools, and operational playbooks to make contrail management a practical reality. Our open-source modelling framework underpins research worldwide, and our real-world trials with major airlines demonstrate that contrail avoidance delivers verifiable climate benefit at a minimal cost.

Our mission is to meaningfully reduce contrail-induced warming by 2030, while establishing the foundations for contrail avoidance to become standard practice in global aviation. We envision a world where intelligent route planning and air traffic management eliminates climate warming contrails with near-zero cost.

Contrails currently cause the same warming impact as 33 billion tonnes of atmospheric CO₂—roughly one year of global anthropogenic emissions. A small subset of flights generates the bulk of this contrail warming, much of which can be avoided through minor altitude or routing adjustments at negligible cost.

What You’ll Do

Contrails.org is seeking a highly motivated and exceptional Site Reliability Engineer with a background in security operations to join our team. You will maintain, harden, and improve the infrastructure behind our research and public tools: our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment, our GitHub development environment, and the software, applications, and managed services that deliver our work to scientists, airlines, and the public. As the engineering team’s reliability and security lead, you will make sure these systems are available when our internal researchers and partners depend on them, secure by default, and simple enough for a small team to operate with confidence. Reporting to the Director, Engineering, you will help shape the platform’s identity and access management, networking, and security posture as our work moves from research into operational use.

Specific Responsibilities

Google Cloud Platform reliability and operations

• Own the day-to-day operation of our GCP environment, including compute, storage, networking, and managed services that support our APIs, data pipelines, and public applications.
• Design, own and maintain logging and alerting with high coverage across core services.
• Lead incident response and blameless post-incident reviews, and turn findings into lasting improvements.
• Plan capacity and manage cloud costs so that our compute and storage spend, including large meteorological and observational datasets, stays efficient and predictable for a non-profit budget.
• Maintain backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans for critical data and services.

Security operations and hardening

• Harden GCP organization, project, and resource configurations, including IAM, service accounts, organization policies, VPC networking, and secrets management, following least-privilege principles.
• Implement and operate security monitoring and threat detection (e.g., Security Command Center, Cloud Audit Logs, centralized logging), and triage and respond to security alerts.
• Run vulnerability and patch management across infrastructure, containers, and software dependencies.
• Develop and maintain security policies, runbooks, and an incident response plan suited to a small organization that handles sensitive partner data, such as flight planning and telemetry data from trial partners.
• Support partner security reviews and questionnaires, and help the organization align with recognized frameworks (e.g., CIS Benchmarks, NIST CSF) as our work with airlines and ANSPs grows.

Development environment and software supply chain

• Administer our GitHub organization, including access controls, team permissions, branch protection, required reviews, and repository standards across public open-source and private repositories.
• Secure the software supply chain, including dependency and secret scanning, signed releases, and trusted publishing of open-source packages such as pycontrails.

Application and managed resource stewardship

• Maintain and improve the hosting, deployment, and configuration of our public-facing applications and websites, including domains, DNS, TLS certificates, and content delivery.
• Keep an inventory of third-party SaaS tools and managed services, and manage access reviews, single sign-on, and onboarding and offboarding.

Collaboration and communication

• Work closely with the Director, Engineering to set reliability and security standards and contribute to platform architecture decisions.
• Exercise clear decision-making, particularly in environments of ambiguity, biasing for outcomes that unblock team progress.
• Promote security awareness across the organization and train developers and researchers in sound security practices when working on local machines with sensitive data and/or credentials.
• Communicate technical risks and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders, including leadership and external partners.

Qualifications

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure roles.
• Hands-on experience operating production workloads on Google Cloud Platform, or deep experience with another major cloud provider and a willingness to go deep on GCP.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform) and CI/CD tooling, particularly GitHub Actions.
• Practical security operations experience, such as cloud IAM hardening, security monitoring and alert triage, vulnerability management, or incident response.
• Proficiency in Python and shell scripting, and experience with containers and container or serverless platforms (e.g., GKE, Cloud Run).
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, with the ability to explain technical and security concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work independently with minimal oversight, manage multiple priorities, and adapt to rapidly changing requirements on a small team.
• Ability to occasionally work outside standard hours to respond to incidents and to accommodate partner meetings across diverse time zones.
• Available for occasional travel (up to 5%) domestically and internationally.

Preferred

• Google Cloud certifications (e.g., Professional Cloud Security Engineer, Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer) or security certifications (e.g., CISSP, Security+).
• Experience with security and compliance programs (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST CSF), or supporting enterprise partner security reviews.
• Experience supporting scientific computing or large-scale data pipelines, including large geospatial or meteorological datasets (e.g., Zarr, NetCDF, BigQuery).
• Experience maintaining infrastructure for open-source projects or public APIs.
• Experience as the first or sole SRE or security engineer at a startup or non-profit.
• Interest in climate, aviation, or atmospheric science.

Salary and Benefits

$160,000 to $185,000 depending on experience, plus a generous benefits package that includes:

• 10% employer 401(k) contribution
• Up to $2,500 a month toward medical coverage for you and your dependents
• Dental and vision covered by Contrails, currently provided as a monthly stipend
• 20 paid vacation days
• 17 paid company holidays
• 12 paid sick days

Commitment to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion

Contrails.org values diversity in all forms and is dedicated to inclusive and transparent recruitment, selection, and promotion processes. Candidates with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences are strongly encouraged to apply. Candidates must have the right to work in the United States.

How to Apply

Apply through this page with your resume and a short answer to the experience question on the application form. Applications close November 23, 2026.