Senior Manager

The Opportunity at Altana

Leading the teams responsible for ensuring the operational health and efficiency of all Altana's technical infrastructure is at the heart of this role, encompassing Observability, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Incident Management across all systems, and internal IT Operations. While the specific technologies and challenges differ between production and internal domains, the core principles of reliability, efficiency, and proactive management are paramount in both. You will work closely with peer teams, including Cloud Engineering, Developer Experience, and Information Security, and actively engage with peers across Engineering regarding our production infrastructure cost and utilization. You will leverage data from Observability and FinOps to gain a holistic understanding of the production platform's performance, reliability, and cost profile, using these insights to drive strategic initiatives, refine our Incident Management processes, and make informed decisions that enhance both the resilience and cost-efficiency of our production systems. Simultaneously, you will ensure our IT Operations provide a stable, secure, and efficient environment that empowers our entire team. This integrated approach, applying operational excellence and data-informed decision-making across both production and internal systems, enables us to scale effectively, proactively address challenges, and maintain a high bar for technical reliability and efficiency across the board.

Key areas under your stewardship include:

• Observability: Define and implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing strategies to gain deep insights into system behavior and performance across our technical infrastructure.

• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Champion SRE principles to ensure the reliability, availability, performance, and efficiency of our production services. 

• Incident Management: Lead and refine the incident response process, ensuring timely detection, mitigation, and resolution, and driving continuous improvement based on post-incident analysis and implementing blameless postmortems.

• IT Operations: Oversee the day-to-day management and reliability of our internal IT infrastructure and services, applying operational excellence principles and ensuring a productive environment for all employees.

• FinOps: Collaborate on implementing strategies and processes to optimize infrastructure costs, leveraging insights to inform operational decisions and drive efficiency.

Your Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership & Planning

• Define and execute the technical strategy for the team, aligning it with overall business objectives for both production reliability and internal IT efficiency.
• Work closely with peer engineering teams to influence infrastructure cost optimization strategies.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure new services are designed and built with operability, reliability, and cost-efficiency in mind.
• Stay current with industry trends and best practices in observability, SRE, cloud operations, FinOps, and IT service management.

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop high-performing teams across the Observability, SRE, Incident Management, and IT Operations functions.
• Champion a culture of proactive monitoring, operational readiness, and continuous learning within your teams.
• Manage on-call rotations and ensure effective response procedures are in place.

Operational Excellence

• Oversee the management and continuous improvement of our internal IT infrastructure, ensuring it meets the needs of a growing, distributed team.
• Lead the incident management process for production issues, ensuring effective communication, rapid response, and thorough post-mortems that lead to lasting improvements.
• Drive automation efforts across operational tasks in both production and internal IT environments to reduce toil and increase efficiency.

About You

• Experience building, leading, and developing high-performing technical operations, SRE, or IT teams.
• Proven experience in implementing and managing observability platforms and practices for production systems.
• Strong understanding of Site Reliability Engineering principles and practices.
• Experience with IT operations, including managing internal infrastructure and services in a modern, cloud-influenced environment.
• Familiarity with FinOps principles and experience leveraging cost data to influence technical and operational decisions, particularly in a cloud environment.
• Demonstrated experience in leading and improving incident management processes for critical systems.
• Proficiency in cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Strong understanding of monitoring and alerting tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills.
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

This role can be based in New York City, Washington D.C., or the San Francisco Bay Area with an expectation of hybrid work or occasional travel as needed. 

US Salary Range and Benefits

$185,000 - $220,000 USD

The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position.  The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.