Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering
No salary listed
Expert
Orlando, FL, USA
In Person
Engineering ManagementEngineering Leadership
About the job
Requirements
- At least 12 years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or reliability engineering at scale.
- At least 5 years in leadership roles (director or principal engineer) managing SRE or reliability teams of 10 or more engineers.
- A demonstrated track record of building SRE programs from scratch or scaling immature programs with measurable business impact.
- Evidence of driving people and organizational transformation and shifting culture from reactive to proactive reliability.
- Deep expertise in SRE practices, including SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems, on-call design, and toil reduction.
- Hands-on experience with observability platforms, including metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting.
- Experience operating both internal platforms and commercial SaaS products.
- Ability to establish standards and drive adoption in multi-team, multi-product environments.
- Ability to define a charter, secure stakeholder buy-in, and execute a multi-year strategy from concept to maturity.
- Comfort with ambiguity and building in greenfield environments.
- Ability to shift organizational mindsets so reliability is a shared responsibility rather than solely an SRE function.
- Ability to articulate reliability concepts to engineers, product managers, and executives.
- Hands-on SRE expertise, including coding, debugging, and architecting solutions alongside the team.
- Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, and telemetry infrastructure.
- Familiarity with multiple deployment models, cloud platforms, and operational challenges.
- Data-driven decision-making and comfort with SLOs, metrics, and evidence-based practices.
- Ability to drive cross-functional change without direct authority.
- Bias toward action and iteration, including making decisions with incomplete information.
Responsibilities
- Build an SRE program from the ground up by defining its charter, operating model, hiring strategy, and multi-year roadmap.
- Establish SRE principles, practices, and standards across observability products and control plane offerings.
- Create unified reliability frameworks for internal-facing and customer-facing systems.
- Design SRE on-call rotations, incident response processes, and a blameless postmortem culture.
- Build and scale an SRE team across observability and control plane domains.
- Design hiring criteria and interview processes to attract SREs with platform and reliability expertise.
- Create mentorship and career-development paths, foster SRE culture, and support continuous learning.
- Shift product and infrastructure teams toward reliability-first mindsets.
- Establish SRE career levels, expectations, and growth frameworks.
- Define and operationalize SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for observability and control plane products.
- Build AI-native toil-reduction initiatives and automate repetitive operational work across SRE and product teams.
- Own incident management by designing escalation policies, postmortem practices, and continuous-improvement loops.
- Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to improve reliability infrastructure, including CI/CD, deployment systems, and monitoring.
- Establish reliability metrics, dashboards, and reporting for leadership visibility.
- Partner with product teams to embed SRE thinking in feature design and development.
- Work with observability leadership on internal versus commercial product strategy and tailor SRE programs accordingly.
- Collaborate with customer success and support on customer-facing reliability and define SLA/SLO communication.
- Partner with infrastructure and platform teams on shared services, runbooks, and operational tooling.
- Engage with security and compliance teams on reliability-related governance and risk.
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with control plane architectures or platform-as-a-service systems.
- Background building SRE programs in hybrid or multi-cloud deployments.
- Track record of mentoring and developing other SRE or platform leaders.
- Familiarity with chaos engineering, reliability testing, or resilience frameworks.
- Open-source contributions or thought leadership in the SRE community.
About the company
ServiceNow builds cloud software that helps large organizations manage work across IT, customer service, human resources, and security. Its applications handle tasks such as resolving support tickets, onboarding employees, and responding to customer requests. Businesses configure forms, approval steps, and automation through visual tools on a common platform, connecting existing systems and using AI to assist workers or carry out tasks. The company sells subscriptions to its applications and platform, with professional services helping customers implement and use the software. Founded in 2004, ServiceNow is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
Company Size
10,001+
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
Founded
2004
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Subscriptions grew: ServiceNow reported $3.877 billion in subscription revenue for the June 2026 quarter, up 24.5% year over year.
- Hybrid work is established: ServiceNow says most staff have flexible arrangements, requiring two or more office days weekly.
- Security work expanded: the April 2026 Armis acquisition added protection for industrial equipment, medical devices, and connected hardware.
What critics are saying
- Subscription margins narrowed: in June 2026, ServiceNow kept 73.5% of subscription revenue after direct costs, versus 80% a year earlier.
- Remote roles limit relocation: ServiceNow requires staff to remain within their employment state, province, region, or country.
- Older versions lose support: ServiceNow supports two release families and schedules upgrades for customers who fall behind.
What makes ServiceNow unique
- Customers get separated systems: ServiceNow assigns each customer its own software instance and database, unlike shared tenant designs.
- Outages get business context: ServiceNow's configuration database maps servers and applications to the business services depending on them.
- Customers choose upgrade timing: ServiceNow's separate instances let enterprises schedule releases independently from other customers.
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Benefits
- Generous family leave
- Flexible PTO
- Matched Donations
- Retirement benefits
- Annual learning stipends
- Paid volunteer time