Deputy Department SRE Manager

Responsibilities and Duties

• Team Leadership: Manage and mentor a team of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), fostering a high-performance culture that emphasizes ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning. Provide regular feedback, coaching, and guidance to help engineers grow in both technical and leadership capabilities. 
• Performance Management: Oversee goal setting and regular evaluations for team members, ensuring individual objectives are clearly aligned with department and company goals. Use data-driven metrics to assess performance and adjust priorities, workloads, and support as needed. 
• Career Development: Support engineers in defining their career paths within the SRE domain, advising on skill development, certifications, and stretch assignments. Promote engineering best practices and create an environment where knowledge sharing and experimentation are encouraged. 
• Project Lifecycle Management: Act as the primary project manager for infrastructure, reliability, and technical debt initiatives within your scope. Coordinate across teams to ensure requirements are clear, dependencies are managed, and projects move smoothly from planning to delivery. 
• Execution & Tracking: Ensure timely delivery of complex technical projects by managing resources, timelines, and risks effectively. Regularly track progress, remove organizational or technical blockers, and communicate status to stakeholders in a transparent manner. 
• Budget & Cost Management: Oversee budgeting and cost management for departmental infrastructure and SaaS vendor products such as CI/CD tooling and monitoring platforms. Continuously analyze spend, identify optimization opportunities, and drive cost-effective architecture and tooling decisions. 
• Expectation Management: Partner and negotiate with Product Teams and other stakeholders to balance reliability requirements with feature delivery velocity. Facilitate discussions on trade-offs using clear data and principles, ensuring that reliability, cost, and developer experience are all appropriately considered. 
• Cross-Functional Interface: Serve as a key point of contact and representative for the SRE department in divisional, cross-functional initiatives. Build strong relationships with engineering, product, and business teams to improve alignment, clarify responsibilities, and strengthen overall reliability culture.  

Job Satisfaction and Experience Gained 

In this role, you will gain hands-on experience scaling an SRE organization that supports multiple products and complex, modern cloud architectures. You will have the opportunity to shape reliability strategy, influence engineering processes across the division, and drive high-impact initiatives that directly affect product quality and developer productivity. By working closely with both leadership and individual contributors, you will deepen your management, stakeholder communication, and technical decision-making skills. You will also be at the forefront of AI-driven productivity initiatives, learning how to integrate AI tools into real-world engineering workflows at scale. 

Expected Role 

As the Deputy Department SRE Manager, you will directly manage a specific subset of SRE teams and act as a core pillar supporting the Department Manager. You will help translate department-level strategies into executable roadmaps for your teams and ensure consistent implementation of reliability practices. Your role will include coordinating across teams to unify standards, reduce duplication, and ensure the SRE organization can continue to grow without sacrificing quality. You will be expected to proactively identify organizational bottlenecks and propose improvements to structures, processes, and tools.

Expected Mindset 

We expect a principle-driven decision-making approach grounded in our core priorities:

1) Reliability, 2) Cost Optimization, and 3) Developer Experience (DevEx).

You should be capable of deeply understanding and navigating trade-offs between reliability, cost, and developer velocity, making pragmatic, data-driven decisions rather than adhering to dogma or personal preference. We value a growth-focused mindset someone who proactively invests in scaling teams, mentoring engineers, and adapting to the evolving needs of a growing engineering organization. An AI-first, efficiency-driven attitude is essential: you should actively leverage AI tools and automation to amplify team output, reduce toil, and enable the organization to scale without linearly increasing headcount. 

Required Skills and Experience

• Leadership Experience: Demonstrated experience in team leadership, technical leadership, or engineering management, such as managing project timelines, mentoring junior engineers, leading technical initiatives, or conducting regular 1-on-1 meetings. 
• Technical Background: Solid foundational experience in an engineering role such as Infrastructure Engineer, DevOps Engineer, SRE, or Software Engineer sufficient to understand architectural discussions and communicate effectively with engineers. 
• Stakeholder Management: Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams, including Product Management and development teams, to negotiate requirements, align priorities, and manage expectations around reliability and delivery. 
• AI-Driven Productivity Enablement: Hands-on experience integrating AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, LLMs) into engineering workflows. Ability to guide and encourage team members to use AI effectively to increase output, automate routine tasks, and accelerate delivery while maintaining quality and security. 

Preferred Skills and Experience

• People Management: Direct experience as a formal Engineering Manager, including responsibilities such as performance evaluations, career goal setting, hiring decisions, and team resource planning. 
• SRE Expertise: Familiarity with SRE principles and practices, such as defining and managing SLIs/SLOs, using error budgets in decision-making, running blameless post-mortems, and overseeing incident response processes. 
• Vendor & Cost Optimization: Experience monitoring infrastructure and SaaS spend and driving optimization initiatives, particularly around CI/CD platforms, cloud providers, and monitoring tools. 
• Experience in AI development and/or experience in using AI tools to improve development processes.