Role Summary

The Manager, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) will lead a team of engineers responsible for improving the reliability, availability, and operational efficiency of assigned Vertafore products or platforms.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on executing reliability initiatives through proactive monitoring, automation, incident management, and continuous improvement. The Manager will work closely with engineering teams and SRE leadership to improve service stability, reduce operational toil, and foster a strong engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities

Reliability & Operational Excellence

·       SLO-Driven Operations: Implement and maintain Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for assigned products, using reliability metrics to identify improvement opportunities.

·       Error Budget Management: Apply established error budget policies and collaborate with Product Development teams to balance feature delivery velocity with platform stability.

·       The Four Golden Signals: Drive monitoring and observability improvements focused on Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation, enabling proactive detection and resolution of potential issues.

·       Continuous Reliability Improvement: Identify recurring reliability issues and drive engineering solutions that prevent incidents rather than repeatedly responding to them.

Toil Management & Engineering

·       The 50% Rule: Actively identify, measure, and reduce operational toil, ensuring the team spends at least 50% of its time on engineering initiatives that improve reliability and reduce future operational overhead.

·       Automation-First Engineering: Lead the development of automation and self-healing capabilities, leveraging Infrastructure-as-Code, modern tooling, and AI to streamline operations.

·       Engineering Execution: Translate reliability improvement opportunities into actionable engineering projects, ensuring timely execution and measurable outcomes.

·       Technical Problem Solving: Provide hands-on technical guidance to engineers in troubleshooting complex production issues, improving system performance, and implementing sustainable solutions.

Incident Response & Blameless Culture

·       Incident Management: Lead the technical response to major production incidents, coordinating troubleshooting efforts, restoring services quickly, and ensuring effective stakeholder communication.

·       Blameless Postmortems: Facilitate post-incident reviews focused on identifying systemic weaknesses, driving corrective actions, and preventing recurring incidents.

·       On-Call Health: Manage and participate in on-call rotations, ensuring timely incident response, balanced workloads, and sustainable operational practices.

·       Operational Readiness: Ensure assigned services have appropriate monitoring, runbooks, escalation procedures, and operational documentation.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Team Leadership

·       Reliability Execution: Partner with Senior Managers, Directors, and SRE leadership to execute reliability priorities aligned with the broader organizational roadmap.

·       Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Product Development, Cloud Ops, DBA, and other infrastructure teams to improve production stability, support infrastructure readiness, and coordinate changes without disrupting service availability.

·       Team Development: Coach and mentor SRE engineers, providing technical guidance, regular feedback, and career development opportunities.

·       Engineering Culture: Foster psychological safety, accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning while promoting SRE engineering principles.

·       Performance & Delivery: Establish clear team priorities, track engineering deliverables, and use operational metrics to demonstrate measurable improvements in reliability and efficiency.

Qualifications

·       Experience: 10+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, Software Engineering, or related infrastructure engineering roles, including 2+ years of technical team leadership or people management experience.

·       Technical Proficiency: Strong hands-on experience with modern CI/CD tools (GitLab, Jenkins, Octopus Deploy), Infrastructure-as-Code, automation, and production troubleshooting.

·       Cloud Infrastructure: Solid experience working with AWS environments, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure operations.

·       Observability: Practical experience implementing monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions to improve production reliability.

·       Incident Management: Demonstrated experience troubleshooting complex production incidents, coordinating incident response, and driving root cause analysis and corrective actions.

·       Leadership: Ability to lead and develop engineers, prioritize competing operational and engineering demands, and foster a collaborative, engineering-first culture.

·       Communication: Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to explain technical issues, reliability metrics, and customer impact to technical and non-technical audiences.