Site Reliability Engineer - Site Reliability Engineering

About Basis

Basis builds real agents that do real work in the real economy. Our agents operate for hours at a time, performing end-to-end work for some of the largest accounting firms in the world.

We recently raised $100M at >$1B valuation and are racing to deploy the most advanced applied ML at production scale.

Our investors include: Khosla Ventures (Keith Rabois & Vinod Khosla), Accel (Miles Clements), Google Ventures, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, Adam D'Angelo, Jeff Dean, Jack Altman, Noam Brown, Kyle Vogt, Amjad Masad, Clem Delangue and many other operators/technical leaders.

"Basis is on the frontier of building production-grade, long-horizon agents. They've pushed the limits of what we thought our models could do on real-world, economically valuable, complex accounting tasks. They've been a great collaborator in helping us shape what the future of agents looks like." — Prashant Mital, Applied AI Lead, OpenAI

About the Role

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Basis, you will ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of our AI-powered accounting platform. You’ll join a high-leverage infrastructure team that sits at the intersection of product and platform, owning the systems that keep Basis fast, secure, and always on as we scale.

This is a hands-on role for an engineer who loves building robust systems, reducing complexity through automation, and taking real ownership. While your primary focus will be infrastructure and reliability, strong software engineering skills are essential. As a growing startup, we value engineers who are comfortable wearing multiple hats and jumping in wherever they can have the biggest impact.

If you’re excited about building resilient systems from the ground up and shaping reliability practices at a fast-growing company, we’d love to work with you.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, build, and operate reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure for our production systems.

• Own cloud infrastructure across compute, storage, and networking, optimizing for availability, performance, and cost efficiency.

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and automation to improve developer velocity and system reliability.

• Lead incident response efforts, including on-call rotations, incident coordination, postmortems, and root cause analyses.

• Partner closely with product and engineering teams to balance reliability, performance, cost, and speed of development.

• Automate operational workflows such as capacity planning, safe rollouts, graceful degradation, and data access controls.

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship, helping shape the culture and standards of the infrastructure team.

What You’ll Bring

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production infrastructure at scale.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in at least one programming language.

• Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and security principles.

• Experience with CI/CD systems, containerization, and modern infrastructure automation.

• Comfort operating in ambiguous environments and taking ownership end-to-end.

Experience with similar stack (or ability to learn unfamiliar technologies) :

• Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.

• Observability and incident management tools (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, BetterStack, PagerDuty, SLOs/error budgets).

• Data and systems powering analytics and customer-facing workloads, especially in serverless environments. (e.g., Neon, Modal)

Our beliefs about the future of technical work:

We believe that as agents become more capable, two themes are emerging:

The builder stack collapses

• Coding agents provide the ability to move across domains in ways that weren't possible before

• You can offload more decision making to the agents inside your product meaning the lines between ML work and eng work start to disappear.

• Approx 20% of product engineering at Basis is teaching agents to tackle non-deterministic workflows. We see that being 70% by end of year.

The distinctions between frontend vs. backend, infra vs. product, ml vs. eng are already melting away.

Engineering > Coding Anything that can be clearly defined and verified will be delegated to an agent. What remains is deciding what to build, breaking down problems from first principles, and designing systems that compound.

The kind of engineer who does well here

We hire individuals, not resumes. Given how fast things are changing, it's more important to hire the best people than to hire the person with specific experience.

First principles and systems thinking. Many of the problems we solve are net new. There's no playbook. We want people who can decompose a novel problem, reason from fundamentals rather than pattern match, and design things that compound.

Thinking beyond the engineering. The engineers who do best here understand the domain deeply: the data systems, the workflows, the work our agents are performing. That understanding is what lets you design better systems, train better agents, and make better product decisions.

Ownership of outcomes. Every project at Basis has a single Responsible Party (RP) who is accountable for whether it ships and whether it works. There are always more things to own than people to own them. Engineers own their own work at Basis. Read more about our RP system here

Agency. Having the initiative to pick up the context you need to make good decisions. Talking to the right people, reading the data, understanding the problem deeply enough to know what matters.

Non-negotiables:

• In person in Flatiron, NYC 5 days a week

• Excited about working with coding agents (we give every engineer an unlimited token budget)

• Excited about working at the frontier of applying agents to real economy problems

Benefits at Basis

We offer a competitive and thoughtful benefits package designed to support your physical, mental, and financial well-being:

• Health & Wellness: Premium Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage; Life Insurance; and 6 coaching & 6 therapy sessions through Spring Health.

  • Basis will cover 100% of your Wellhub Gold membership.

  • Wellhub gives you access to gyms like Lifetime, SoulCycle, NYSC and so many more - as well as access to wellness apps like Strava & Headspace!

• Time off: Unlimited PTO + 12 paid company holidays.

• In-Office Perks: Daily meal stipends, a fully stocked kitchen, and $300 toward your custom desk setup.

• Financial Benefits: Pre-tax commuter benefits and 401(k) retirement plan

• Team Culture: Monthly office activities and frequent optional team happy hours.

• Parental Support: Access to Carrot Fertility and paid parental leave.