Lead Site Reliability Engineer
UMT - Internal · San Francisco
Who We Are
UnitedMasters
UnitedMasters is building a marketplace that connects artists, brands and fans - empowering artists to earn and grow. UnitedMasters has taken the bold step of building a music distribution service that, radically, puts artists first - disrupting the legacy music business by letting up-and-coming artists distribute their music directly to fans through streaming services while maintaining ownership of their master recording rights and up to 100% of royalties. Through the combination of UnitedMasters' music distribution platform and its deep ties to brands, UnitedMasters enables independent artists and change-makers to grow and earn unlike any other platform.
The UnitedMasters team is made up of musicians, marketers, engineers, and storytellers with backgrounds from YouTube, SoundCloud, Pandora, Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, Complex, VICE, and more. We work hand in hand with the award-winning creative teams that forge those innovative partnerships at Translation (our in-house creative advertising agency).
The Role
You'll partner with platform, data, QA, and product engineers across the organization, owning the intersection of reliability and security: the tooling, monitoring, alerting, emergency response, and systems design the whole org depends on.
A defining part of the role is building how we protect our systems going forward. We're investing in agentic, AI-driven security pipelines that continuously detect, triage, and help remediate vulnerabilities across our codebase and infrastructure — and you'll lead the design and stewardship of that capability.
Above all, though, this is a coaching and consulting role. We're looking for a strong listener, patient collaborator, thoughtful architect, and skilled builder — someone who identifies needs in reliability and security and empowers peer developers to improve them.
What You'll Do
- Partner with platform, data, QA, and product teams to understand their automation, infrastructure, monitoring, and security needs.
- Build tooling and processes that solve the problems those conversations surface.
- Build and maintain an agentic vulnerability detection and mitigation pipeline that will scan, triage, and propose fixes, with human-in-the-loop guardrails.
- Embed security into the development lifecycle, including threat modeling, supp ly-chain hygiene, secrets management, secure-by-default patterns.
- Lead security and reliability incident response as first-class operational concerns.
- Define company-level SLAs, SLOs, and Error Budgets, and help teams set their own.
- Steer system design toward shared tooling and decisions that ensure reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability.
- Join the on-call rotation as a peer to spot process gaps and coach on response.
- Act as a senior escalation for infrastructure and security issues, helping resolve them while coaching teams to handle the next.
- Own our AWS infrastructure and set the long-term strategy for our reliability and security posture, balancing scalability and cost.
Who You Are
- Senior-to-staff experience as an SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineer, owning production reliability at scale.
- Hands-on application and/or infrastructure security experience; enough to lead the security conversation without a separate security team in the room.
- Practical experience building with LLMs and agentic systems. You've shipped something real and understand their failure modes and where human oversight is non-negotiable.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals. You build tools and systems, not just configure them.
- A coaching instinct: you measure impact by how much you raise the teams around you.
Our Values
- We Get on the Plane — Entrepreneurial spirit means fully committing to the journey not just having the idea.
- We Expect Challenge + Respect — We constantly challenge each other and the work to reach excellence, always with respect.
- We Are Defined by Our Resilience — We stay resourceful, fail fast, keep getting better, and never quit on our mission or our team.
- We Pursue Answers Before the Question Has to Be Asked — We understand our customers so well that we anticipate what they need before they ask.
- We Run Towards Darkness — We have the courage to work through uncertainty rather than settling for an easier, inferior plan.
- We Know What We Don't Know — We bring confidence in what we do know, and honesty about what we don't.
Compensation
Salary Hiring Range: $195,000 - $240,000
Our salary ranges are designed to be competitive for companies of our size and within our industry and represent just one part of our overall rewards package. We also offer company-sponsored medical, dental, and vision plans, a 401(k) with company match, and, depending on the role and individual circumstances, additional compensation opportunities such as bonuses and stock options.
Individual pay rate decisions are based on a number of factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, skillset, and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company. We expect the majority of the candidates who are offered roles at our company to fall healthily throughout the range based on these factors.
The range above is for the expectations as laid out in the job description, however we are often open to a wide variety of profiles, and recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description as posted. If that ends up being the case, the updated salary range will be communicated with you as a candidate.
The salary range above is for NY/CA. As a company, we have a location-based strategy, which means the salary range could be lower or higher than this if the role is hired in another location.
About UnitedMasters, Inc.
UnitedMasters Inc. represents the creative solutions company, Translation, and the leading software and services platform for independent creators, UnitedMasters. UnitedMasters enables ownership, exposure, and new paths for financial return for independent creators, while Translation helps brands leverage the power of contemporary culture to achieve transformational growth. Combined, UnitedMasters, Inc. is the world's leading marketplace for cultural capital, connecting independent artists and brands to realize a future in which all creators own their future. Backed by Alphabet, Andreessen Horowitz, and Apple, UnitedMasters, Inc. is reimagining how brands and artists come together to tell their stories, build profitable growth, and push culture forward.
Equal Opportunity & Accommodation
UnitedMasters is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We seek to bring together diverse ideas, experiences, skill sets, perspectives, backgrounds and identities to drive innovative solutions. We commit to promoting a welcoming environment where inclusion and belonging are held as a shared responsibility.
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
Phishing Scam Warning
PHISHING SCAM WARNING: UnitedMasters is among several companies recently made aware of a phishing scam involving con artists posing as hiring managers recruiting via email, text and social media. The imposters are creating misleading email accounts, conducting remote “interviews,” and making fake job offers in order to collect personal and financial information from unsuspecting individuals. Please be aware that no job offers will be made from UnitedMasters without a formal interview process. Additionally, UnitedMasters will not ask you to purchase equipment or supplies as part of your onboarding process. If you have any questions, please reach out to TA@unitedmasters.com.