Manager, Site Reliability Engineer

The Manager of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) will lead a team focused on enhancing the reliability, availability, and operational efficiency of designated Vertafore products or platforms. This hands-on leadership role emphasizes executing reliability initiatives through proactive monitoring, automation, incident management, and continuous improvement. The Manager will collaborate closely with engineering teams and SRE leadership to improve service stability, reduce operational toil, and cultivate a strong engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities

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

Error Budget Management: Apply error budget policies and work with Product Development teams to balance feature delivery speed with platform stability.

The Four Golden Signals: Enhance monitoring and observability focusing on Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation to enable early detection and resolution of potential issues.

Continuous Reliability Improvement: Identify recurring reliability problems and lead engineering efforts to prevent incidents rather than repeatedly responding to them.

Toil Management & Engineering

The 50% Rule: Actively measure and reduce operational toil, ensuring the team dedicates at least half of its time to engineering projects that improve reliability and reduce future overhead.

Automation-First Engineering: Lead automation and self-healing initiatives using Infrastructure-as-Code, modern tools, and AI to streamline operations.

Engineering Execution: Convert reliability improvement opportunities into actionable projects with clear timelines and measurable results.

Technical Problem Solving: Provide hands-on guidance to engineers for troubleshooting complex production issues, enhancing system performance, and implementing sustainable solutions.

Incident Response & Blameless Culture

Incident Management: Lead technical responses to major production incidents, coordinate troubleshooting, restore services promptly, and communicate effectively with stakeholders.

Blameless Postmortems: Facilitate post-incident reviews focused on systemic improvements, corrective actions, and preventing recurrence.

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

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

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Team Leadership

Reliability Execution: Partner with senior leadership to align and execute reliability priorities within the organizational roadmap.

Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Product Development, Cloud Operations, DBA, and infrastructure teams to enhance production stability and coordinate changes without disrupting service availability.

Team Development: Mentor SRE engineers by providing technical guidance, feedback, and career growth opportunities.

Engineering Culture: Promote psychological safety, accountability, collaboration, continuous learning, and adherence to SRE principles.

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

Required Qualifications

Experience: Over 10 years in SRE, DevOps, Software Engineering, or related infrastructure roles, including at least 2 years in technical leadership or people management.

Technical Proficiency: Hands-on experience with modern CI/CD tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, and Octopus Deploy, Infrastructure-as-Code, automation, and production troubleshooting.

Cloud Infrastructure: Strong background working with AWS environments, distributed systems, and cloud operations.

Observability: Proven ability to implement monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions that enhance production reliability.

Incident Management: Experience troubleshooting complex production incidents, coordinating responses, and leading root cause analysis and corrective actions.

Leadership: Skilled in leading and developing engineering teams, managing competing demands, and fostering a collaborative, engineering-first culture.

Communication: Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, capable of explaining technical issues, reliability metrics, and customer impact to both technical and non-technical audiences.

No preferred qualifications or benefits were specified for this role.