Senior Manager – SRE

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Recruit, guide, mentor, and cultivate a high-achieving team of Site Reliability Engineers, focusing on coaching, career progression, and performance evaluation.

• Supervise other engineering managers as necessary and assist in enhancing leadership capabilities within the organization.

• Set team goals, objectives, and reliability priorities, ensuring commitments are fulfilled or expectations are proactively adjusted when situations evolve.

• Collaborate with engineering leaders across Backblaze to outline strategic priorities and execution plans.

• Create and enhance automation processes that expedite the deployment of new storage vaults, core servers, and supporting infrastructure.

• Oversee and refine vulnerability management and patching schedules to ensure compliance with contractual, operational, and security standards.

• Lead intricate reliability initiatives from problem identification through to implementation and resolution.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to enhance observability, monitoring, and alerting, providing valuable insights into the health and performance of Backblaze's infrastructure.

• Direct the analysis of SLA and reliability performance, pinpoint areas of risk, and implement corrective actions.

• Engage in leadership on-call rotations, major incident responses, and post-incident reviews to enhance service reliability continuously.

• Provide guidance during incidents and ensure that root cause analyses, corrective actions, and follow-up tasks are executed effectively.

• Implement established ITIL and operational processes across incident, change, problem, and capacity management.

• Collaborate with Engineering, Customer Success, Product, and Operations teams to facilitate resilient system design and dependable production operations.

• Interact with customers to comprehend their reliability needs and ensure that stability priorities align with customer experiences and business requirements.

• Work with vendors and service providers to diagnose service issues and monitor SLA performance.

• Lead cross-functional initiatives to identify deficiencies in observability, operational processes, reliability, and infrastructure management.

• Recognize ongoing operational challenges and devise long-term strategies and action plans to resolve them.

• Document systems, disseminate learnings, and foster a reliability-oriented engineering culture throughout Backblaze.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, infrastructure, or production operations, with substantial engineering leadership experience.

• Proven track record in building, managing, mentoring, and developing high-performing technical teams.

• Experience in leading reliability or infrastructure organizations that operate large-scale, production-grade systems.

• Strong proficiency in deploying and managing extensive fleets of Linux hosts, with a significant focus on automation.

• In-depth knowledge of observability and monitoring technologies such as VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch, or similar platforms.

• Experience in establishing operational procedures, runbooks, incident processes, and reliability practices at scale.

• Comprehensive understanding of storage systems, including performance, sharding, distributed architectures, and storage algorithms.

• Familiarity with load-balancing technologies and services, including IPVS or comparable options.

• Experience managing security-focused infrastructure operations, encompassing patching, hardening, vulnerability detection, and remediation.

• Proven ability to lead major incidents and post-incident processes, including root cause analysis and corrective action strategy formulation.

• Experience utilizing automation and AI-assisted technologies to enhance engineering productivity, system performance, operational efficiency, or scalability.

• Capability to independently take ownership of complex issues and drive initiatives from discovery through to resolution.

• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to engage effectively with engineers, executives, customers, vendors, and cross-functional stakeholders.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity grants for eligible full-time employees.

• Annual company bonus program.

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for eligible employees and their family members.

• 401(k) program.

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

• Flexible vacation policy.

• Parental leave benefits.

• MacBook Pro and workstation support.

• Childcare support.

• Fertility treatment and family-building assistance.

• Opportunities for learning and development.

• Commuter benefits where applicable.

• A culture that promotes a healthy work-life balance.