$70-$200/hr DevOps and reliability work, on your schedule
Review AI infra for the config that takes down the cluster, the rollback that won't work, the alert that's pure noise. The judgment from running real systems under real load. Paid hourly, remote, a few hours a week.
Trusted by top research companies
Hi, we're Zac and Jack, the founders of Terac. We want to talk to you directly, because you are the most important part of what we're building.
Terac is a community of experts. People who have spent years getting good at something specific and hard. The world is about to need more of you, not less. As AI takes on more of the world's work, the bottleneck shifts to the people who actually know what they're talking about.
Expert labor is the rarest resource in the world right now, and it is shockingly hard to find. The companies that need an SRE's eye on a deploy that will page someone at 3am spend weeks chasing people, paying placement fees, and settling for whoever is available. Meanwhile thousands of qualified people are sitting with knowledge that no one ever asks for.
That gap is what we're here to close. Every project that lands on Terac is routed to the people who actually know the answer, on their schedule, paid fairly, and only when the work is verified. No middleman taking a cut of your time. No vague gigs. No chasing checks.
We care about every single person in this community. If you join Terac, you're not a row in a database to us. We read the feedback. We answer the emails. We will fight for you when a customer is being unreasonable, and we will be honest with you when something on our side is broken. The quality of this panel is our entire company, and we owe you a serious bar.
If you've made it this far, here is what we're asking: claim your profile. Put your expertise on the record. Let the world's most ambitious teams come find you for the work only you can do.
DevOps & SRE questions
Still curious? Write to us at support@terac.com.
Narrow depth is often the most valuable, because models struggle most at the edges of a field. Explaining why you would reach for eBPF over a sidecar, or how a reconciliation loop handles partial failures, is exactly what trainers need. Generalist SRE experience is also in demand, so you do not need to be a specialist.
CKA, CKS, and AWS DevOps Professional are useful signals of depth, and noting them helps match you to the right tasks. They are not required. Reviewers with strong production experience and no active cert are regularly accepted, and practical knowledge carries more weight than an expiration date.
No. Tasks are built on hypothetical systems, sanitized scenarios, and publicly documented architectures, not your employer's live infra or proprietary configs. You are paid for your reasoning, not for access to systems you must protect. Never submit anything that would breach an employment agreement or vendor terms.
It varies, but commonly reviewing AI Terraform and Pulumi for correctness and security, evaluating Kubernetes manifests and Helm charts against production-readiness, and critiquing CI/CD definitions in tools like GitHub Actions or Argo Workflows. You may also write worked examples of incident response or SLO/SLI reasoning.
Platform engineering is directly relevant and in active demand: internal Kubernetes platform design, golden-path templates, developer portals, and service mesh policy, where classic SRE expertise alone leaves gaps. If your day-to-day centers on Backstage, Crossplane, or paved roads for other engineers, that is a distinct, valuable sub-domain.
Why your expertise matters
A model writes Terraform, a Helm chart, or a runbook where one subtle misconfig cascades into an outage: a missing readinessProbe that triggers thundering-herd restarts, a permissive pod security policy, a pipeline that skips smoke tests under a race. Your corrections teach the model the difference between code that compiles and infra that holds under load.
How pay works
Top of the $70-$200 band reflects depth: staff-level SLO-driven reliability work, regulated environments (SOC 2, FedRAMP, PCI), or fluency across clouds plus hybrid on-prem. Work is remote and async, picked up on your schedule, and paid after your work passes verification.
What the work looks like
A sample of the DevOps and reliability work you would pick up. Every project is scoped, remote, and paid on verified completion.
- Review a model's Terraform module for a multi-region EKS cluster and flag missing lifecycle rules, insecure IAM trust policies, and state-locking gaps.
- Evaluate a machine-written runbook for a Redis memory saturation alert and flag steps that assume access on-call may not have at 2 AM.
- Write a worked example of sizing a Prometheus recording rule for a high-cardinality service, annotating each aggregation choice.
- Score a set of AI GitHub Actions workflows on correctness, secret handling, and idempotency with line-level PR-style feedback.
- Write a postmortem for a hypothetical Kubernetes node-pressure eviction, with a timeline, contributing factors, and concrete action items.
- Assess whether a model's SLO captures user-visible reliability versus internal health, and rewrite the error-budget burn-rate thresholds where wrong.
Specialties we match
DevOps & SRE projects span a wide range of focus areas. Tell us where you go deep and we route the work that fits.
- Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS)
- Terraform / OpenTofu IaC
- Incident management and postmortems
- SLO/SLI/error budget design
- CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Jenkins)
- Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
- Linux systems and kernel tuning
- Cloud networking and zero-trust (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, Cilium)
- Container security (Falco, OPA/Gatekeeper, Trivy)
- Chaos engineering (Chaos Monkey, Litmus, Gremlin)
- Database reliability (RDS, Spanner, etcd backup/restore)
- On-call runbook design and toil reduction
