Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Lead Site Reliability Engineer
Location: Houston, TX
Reports to: Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering 

A quick snapshot…

As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer on Conga’s Cloud Operations team, you’ll set the technical direction for how we run, scale, and secure the platform behind Conga’s products. You’ll own the reliability, scalability, and security of the cloud platform our products depend on, and you’ll drive the use of AI and automation to remove toil and speed up incident response.

This is a senior, hands-on role for an engineer who wants influence beyond a single service. You’ll mentor engineers, lead complex reliability initiatives across team boundaries, and serve as a key technical partner to Engineering, Architecture, and Security. You’ll work in a highly connected environment, on a small team that supports a large customer base, so you’ll need to ramp quickly and build trust across groups.

Why it’s a big deal…

At Conga, the reliability of our cloud platform directly impacts the experience we deliver to our customers. As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you’ll help ensure the infrastructure behind Conga’s products is resilient, scalable, secure, and ready to support the continued growth and evolution of our business.

This role sits at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, engineering, security, and operational excellence. You’ll have broad technical influence across our Azure and AWS environments, Kubernetes platform, networking and Cloudflare edge, data platforms, and observability capabilities. When complex production challenges arise, you’ll be one of the technical leaders teams look to for direction.

But this role isn’t only about keeping systems running. You’ll help shape how Conga operates at scale. You’ll drive greater automation, reduce operational toil, strengthen reliability practices, and help introduce AI-assisted capabilities that allow our teams to detect issues earlier, respond faster, and continuously improve how we operate our platform.

You’ll also have the opportunity to raise the technical bar across the organization by mentoring engineers, influencing architecture and engineering decisions, and partnering across Product Engineering, Architecture, Security, AI, and Cloud Operations.

The impact is significant: more resilient platforms, faster incident response, greater engineering efficiency, and a stronger experience for the customers who depend on Conga every day.

What you’ll do

Own platform reliability and architecture

• Act as the primary technical lead for the reliability, scalability, and performance of Conga’s Azure and AWS cloud platforms.
• Design and drive reliability architecture, including multi-region resilience, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and cost efficiency.
• Define and own SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets with product engineering teams, and use them to prioritize reliability investments.
• Lead the evolution of infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines so changes are repeatable, reviewed, and safe to ship.

Own networking and the Cloudflare edge

• Own the design and operation of Conga’s edge and network architecture on Cloudflare, including DNS, load balancing, WAF, and DDoS protection, and partner with Security on Zero Trust and network access controls.
• Design and troubleshoot cloud networking across Azure and AWS, including VNet and VPC design, routing, and private connectivity, and lead investigations into latency, connectivity, and TLS issues.

Lead our Kubernetes platform

• Set standards for how Kubernetes clusters and containerized services are built, deployed, upgraded, and operated.
• Lead cluster upgrades and capacity planning, and troubleshoot complex performance and scaling issues in production.

Lead our NoSQL and SQL Server platforms

• Own the operational health of Cassandra and OpenSearch clusters, including capacity, performance tuning, backup and recovery, upgrades, and data-model guidance for engineering teams.
• Support SQL Server databases, including availability, performance tuning, backup and recovery, and patching, in partnership with engineering teams.
• Lead complex performance investigations and large-scale migrations or upgrades from design through production rollout.

Drive AI and automation

• Set the strategy for eliminating operational toil through well-tested automation, tooling, and self-service workflows.
• Lead the adoption of AI and machine learning in operations, including alert quality, anomaly detection, automated triage, and AI-assisted runbooks and incident response.
• Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted tooling responsibly, with attention to security, accuracy, and data handling.

Lead incident response and operational excellence

• Serve as an escalation point and incident commander for high-severity production incidents, including root cause analysis and long-term remediation.
• Build and tune observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting so teams see problems before customers do.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and help shape on-call health and escalation practices.

Lead and raise the bar

• Mentor and coach Site Reliability Engineers, and provide technical guidance to engineering groups beyond your own.
• Provide technical leadership through code reviews, design reviews, and operational readiness reviews.

Partner across Conga

• Collaborate with Product Engineering, Architecture, Security, AI, and other Cloud Operations teams to deliver secure, reliable, reusable platform capabilities.
• Engage with support and customer-facing teams on escalations, and work through conflicting priorities with internal stakeholders.

Are you the person we’re looking for?

• 7+ years in site reliability, DevOps, cloud operations, or platform engineering, supporting enterprise SaaS services that operate at scale.
• 2+ years as a technical lead or senior contributor on shared platform or infrastructure services.
• Deep, hands-on experience running production workloads on Microsoft Azure and AWS, with depth in at least one, including compute, networking, identity, and managed services.
• Strong experience operating Kubernetes in production at scale, including cluster design, upgrades, troubleshooting, and workload tuning.
• Strong experience with NoSQL data stores, ideally Apache Cassandra and OpenSearch, including performance tuning, capacity planning, and recovery.
• Working experience with SQL Server, including performance tuning, backup and recovery, and high availability.
• Strong proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language such as Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell, and a record of automating operational work.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM, or similar) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience designing and operating observability for metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, and reliability practices such as SLOs, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and incident management.
• Hands-on experience with Cloudflare (DNS, WAF, DDoS protection, load balancing, and Zero Trust) and solid networking knowledge, including TCP/IP, TLS, HTTP, routing, and VNet or VPC design, with the ability to troubleshoot connectivity and latency issues.
• Experience applying AI or automation to improve operations, such as intelligent alerting, automated triage, or AI-assisted runbooks and tooling.
• Experience leading incident response and root cause analysis for high-severity production incidents, including on-call participation.
• Experience leading complex initiatives end to end: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and support.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing teams you don’t directly manage through collaboration and technical credibility.
• Strong communication skills and executive presence. You can work effectively with Architecture, Security, Product, engineering leaders, and junior engineers, and explain technical tradeoffs clearly to different audiences.

Here’s what will give you an edge…

• Azure or AWS certifications (such as AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-400, AWS Solutions Architect, or AWS DevOps Engineer)
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or similar credential
• Deep experience with Cassandra operations at scale (multi-datacenter, compaction tuning, repair strategies) or OpenSearch cluster design and lifecycle management
• Experience with multi-cloud architecture or migrations between Azure and AWS
• Experience with GitOps tooling (Argo CD, Flux) and Helm
• Experience building AI-driven or agent-based automation for operations, incident response, or developer self-service
• Familiarity with Prometheus, Grafana, or similar observability stacks
• Exposure to security and compliance practices for cloud platforms, such as SOC 2 controls, secrets management, and policy-as-code
• Experience leading or mentoring an SRE team through growth, on-call design, or reliability program rollout