Job Description

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership & Execution

• Provide technical direction and oversight for SRE initiatives, ensuring best practices in reliability, scalability, and performance.

• Remain hands-on where needed, contributing to system design, automation, and incident resolution.

• Guide the design and development of tools supporting 24x7 follow-the-sun operations.

• Drive automation across infrastructure provisioning, deployments, and operational workflows.

• Ensure effective observability strategies (metrics, logging, tracing) and promote self-healing systems.

• Partner with engineering teams to influence system design for reliability and operability.

Reliability, Process Engineering & Continuous Improvement

• Design, evolve, and simplify SRE processes (incident management, production readiness, capacity planning, change management) with a focus on effectiveness over overhead.

• Apply process engineering principles—ensuring processes are lightweight, scalable, and enable teams rather than slow them down.

• Prioritize people over process: use processes as guardrails, not rigid workflows, and empower engineers to make sound decisions.

• Proactively identify gaps, inefficiencies, and risks—and drive them through to resolution with a bias for action.

• Establish and enforce SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets across services.

• Lead major incident response and ensure blameless postmortems result in real, implemented improvements, not just documentation.

• Continuously reduce operational toil through automation and simplification.

• Ensure follow-the-sun operations are practical, sustainable, and optimized for real-world execution.

Leading People Working for You

• Hire, onboard, and develop SRE engineers.

• Lead the people working for you by setting clear expectations, providing guidance, and removing obstacles to execution.

• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and service orientation.

• Support engineers in making decisions and taking action, rather than relying on rigid processes or escalation.

• Encourage critical thinking and problem-solving over checklist-driven execution.

• Balance workload across the team, ensuring sustainable on-call participation and operational responsibilities.

• Set clear priorities and ensure the team is focused on high-impact work that improves reliability and customer outcomes.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Service Mentality

• Act as a key stakeholder across SRE Platform, Product Development, and Cloud Engineering teams.

• Demonstrate a strong service mentality—ensuring platform capabilities meet the needs of internal teams and customers.

• Balance platform standards with pragmatism, enabling teams while maintaining reliability and guardrails.

• Partner with teams to solve problems collaboratively, rather than acting as a gatekeeper.

• Drive adoption of best practices through influence, not enforcement alone.

Operational Strategy & Execution

• Define and track metrics that reflect real outcomes (reliability, customer impact, team efficiency), not just process adherence.

• Ensure work is prioritized toward meaningful improvements in reliability, scalability, and developer experience.

• Continuously evaluate whether processes, tools, and practices are delivering value—and adjust when they are not.

• Avoid unnecessary process overhead; focus on enabling teams to move faster safely.

• Advocate for and drive investments in platform improvements and reliability initiatives.

Documentation & Knowledge Sharing

• Ensure high-quality documentation, runbooks, and operational guidance.

• Promote knowledge sharing across teams and regions.

• Enable teams to operate independently through clear documentation and tooling.

Who You Are

Technical Expertise

• Strong programming skills in Python or Go; experience with Java/Spring Boot is a plus.

• Deep experience with Kubernetes (EKS), including networking, ingress, and operator patterns.

• Expertise in Terraform and infrastructure as code at scale.

• Advanced knowledge of AWS services and distributed systems architecture.

• Strong background in observability tools such as Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or Datadog.

• Experience supporting production systems at scale in a microservices environment.

• Familiarity with CI/CD systems such as TeamCity, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.

• Understanding of SSO, SAML, OAuth; experience with Okta is a plus.

Leadership & Ownership

• Proven experience leading engineers working for you while remaining technically credible.

• Demonstrated ability to build and evolve processes that serve people and outcomes, not bureaucracy.

• Strong sense of ownership with a track record of driving issues through to resolution.

• Demonstrated ability to identify problems, take initiative, and implement solutions without waiting for direction.

• Ability to balance short-term operational needs with long-term improvements.

• Comfortable making decisions and taking accountability in high-pressure situations.

Collaboration & Communication

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence across teams.

• Ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights.

• Experience working in agile environments (Scrum, Kanban).

Mindset

• Strong service-oriented mindset with a focus on enabling others to succeed.

• Bias toward action and problem-solving over coordination and escalation.

• Focus on outcomes, not process overhead.

• Passion for reliability, automation, and continuous improvement.

• Curiosity and willingness to explore emerging technologies, including AI, to improve productivity and outcomes.

Bonus Points

• Kubernetes or AWS certifications.

• Experience leading SRE or platform teams.

• Contributions to open source projects.

• Familiarity with tools like KubeVela (OAM) or Crossplane.

• Experience implementing SLO/error budget frameworks at scale.