Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Job Title:

Job Description

About the Role

As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you will own the reliability and availability of our production systems. You will champion SRE principles across engineering teams — defining SLOs, managing error budgets, and leading a culture of blameless incident response. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will partner closely with product and engineering teams to balance the pace of innovation with the stability our customers depend on.

Key Responsibilities

Reliability Ownership

• Define, implement, and own Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budgets across critical services.
• Use error budget policies to drive data-informed conversations between engineering and product on release velocity vs. reliability trade-offs.
• Conduct capacity planning and proactive risk assessments to prevent incidents before they occur.

Incident Management

• Lead incident response as incident commander — coordinating teams, driving resolution, and maintaining clear stakeholder communication during outages.
• Facilitate thorough, blameless postmortems and ensure action items are tracked, prioritized, and resolved.
• Develop and continuously improve runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call practices to reduce MTTD and MTTR.

Observability & Monitoring

• Design and maintain observability strategies using modern tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK) to ensure full visibility into system health.
• Define intelligent alerting that is actionable and minimizes alert fatigue.
• Drive adoption of distributed tracing and structured logging across services.

Toil Reduction & Automation

• Identify and measure toil across the engineering organization and lead initiatives to eliminate it through automation.
• Build internal tooling and self-service capabilities that improve developer productivity and system reliability.

Infrastructure & Platform Reliability

• Collaborate with platform and infrastructure teams on cloud-native patterns for fault tolerance, auto-scaling, and disaster recovery.
• Provide SRE input into CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (e.g., canary releases, blue/green deployments) to minimize production risk.
• Manage infrastructure using IaC practices (Terraform or equivalent) with a focus on reliability and consistency.

Leadership & Culture

• Mentor and grow junior SREs, fostering a culture of ownership, curiosity, and continuous improvement.
• Act as an SRE advocate across engineering — embedding reliability thinking into the software development lifecycle.
• Partner with key stakeholders to align SRE strategy with broader organizational goals.
• Conduct regular 1:1s with direct reports and participate in team rituals.

AI Expectations

As with all engineers at our organization, this role requires an AI-native mindset. Specifically, you will be expected to:

• Embed AI tools and practices into how we build and run our platform — deploying AI-powered capabilities and shipping real AI features into production.
• Support engagement and solutioning for AI-powered offerings, translating technical capabilities into tangible business value.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners — including Product, Data, Security, and Legal — to ensure AI is delivered safely, effectively, and in compliance with relevant standards.

What We're Looking For

Must-Haves

• 7+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proven experience defining and managing SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets in a production environment.
• Strong incident management experience, including leading postmortems and driving reliability improvements.
• Hands-on experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar).
• Solid understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerized environments (Kubernetes).
• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language (Python, Go, or Bash).

Nice to Have

• Experience with chaos engineering tools (e.g., Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, LitmusChaos).
• Familiarity with IaC tooling such as Terraform or Pulumi.
• Knowledge of DevSecOps practices and security tooling.
• Experience with GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines.
• Bilingual proficiency (English & Spanish).

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