Director, Site Reliability Engineering

About the role

Since 2014, the mission-driven team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has helped fuel the tremendous growth of the Stellar blockchain network, an open-source platform that operates at high-scale today. Developers and companies around the world build on it, and the SDF team is expanding to support the rapidly growing and changing Stellar ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop a distributed SRE team, setting a clear vision, charter, operating model, priorities, and success measures.
• Define and roll out a Service Ownership & Maturity Framework across engineering, with expectations that vary appropriately by service criticality.
• Own and improve core engineering infrastructure services, including cloud foundations, Kubernetes and compute patterns, CI/CD, observability, secrets management, GitHub workflows, and infrastructure automation.
• Help engineering teams become stronger owners and operators of their services through better standards, dashboards, runbooks, alerting, escalation paths, operational readiness, and deployment practices.
• Mature incident response, escalation, postmortems, and on-call health across a geographically distributed team.
• Build paved paths and self-service infrastructure that reduce toil, lower cognitive load, and help engineering teams move faster while strengthening ownership and reliability.
• Partner closely with Security, Compliance, Legal, Finance, Procurement, and Corporate IT where infrastructure, access management, cloud operations, vendor review, or controls intersect with engineering.
• Pragmatically evaluate AI-assisted and agentic workflows where they can improve infrastructure operations, service ownership, developer workflows, or toil reduction.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, production operations, or closely related engineering roles.
• 5+ years of experience leading, managing, or formally developing infrastructure, SRE, platform, or reliability engineers.
• Strong experience defining team charters, operating models, roadmaps, success measures, and engineering practices for infrastructure or reliability teams.
• Deep technical judgment across cloud infrastructure, production operations, distributed systems, reliability tradeoffs, automation, and operational risk.
• 3+ years of experience with modern cloud infrastructure in AWS, GCP, or similar environments.
• 3+ years of experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, declarative systems, CI/CD, and deployment safety.
• Strong experience with observability, monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards, SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, and on-call practices.
• Experience helping product or application engineering teams improve service ownership, operational readiness, and production accountability.
• A pragmatic approach to tooling: you understand when to build, buy, adapt, simplify, or retire systems based on the actual engineering problem.
• The ability to operate effectively in a small or mid-sized engineering organization where influence comes from credibility, judgment, and outcomes rather than bureaucracy.
• Clear executive communication skills and the ability to partner directly with a CTO and senior engineering leaders.

Qualifications

• Experience leading, managing, or developing infrastructure, SRE, platform, or reliability teams.
• Experience defining team charters, operating models, roadmaps, success measures, and engineering practices for infrastructure or reliability teams.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, declarative systems, CI/CD, and deployment safety.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards, SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, and on-call practices.
• Experience helping product or application engineering teams improve service ownership, operational readiness, and production accountability.
• A pragmatic approach to tooling: understanding when to build, buy, adapt, simplify, or retire systems based on the actual engineering problem.
• The ability to operate effectively in a small or mid-sized engineering organization where influence comes from credibility, judgment, and outcomes rather than bureaucracy.
• Clear executive communication skills and the ability to partner directly with a CTO and senior engineering leaders.

Skills

• Strong technical judgment across cloud infrastructure, production operations, distributed systems, reliability tradeoffs, automation, and operational risk.
• Experience with modern cloud infrastructure in AWS, GCP, or similar environments.
• Experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, declarative systems, CI/CD, and deployment safety.
• Strong experience with observability, monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards, SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, and on-call practices.
• Experience helping product or application engineering teams improve service ownership, operational readiness, and production accountability.
• A pragmatic approach to tooling: understanding when to build, buy, adapt, simplify, or retire systems based on the actual engineering problem.
• The ability to operate effectively in a small or mid-sized engineering organization where influence comes from credibility, judgment, and outcomes rather than bureaucracy.
• Clear executive communication skills and the ability to partner directly with a CTO and senior engineering leaders.

Benefits

In addition to a competitive base salary range of $205,000 - $305,000, SDF offers a comprehensive benefits package including:

• USA Benefits/Perks: Competitive health, dental & vision coverage with most plans covered at 100% for the employee + any dependents.
• Flexible time off + 15 company holidays including a company-wide holiday break.
• Generous paid parental leave for all parents, plus paid pregnancy disability leave for birthing parents.
• Gym reimbursement ($80 per month).
• Life & ADD (up to $50K).
• Short & Long term disability.
• 401K with 4% match.
• Health & Dependent Care FSA Accounts.
• Commuter benefits with $250/month employer contribution.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with monthly employer contribution.
• Family building benefits through Kindbody.
• Wellbeing benefits (One Medical, Rightway, Headspace).
• L&D budget of $1,500/year.
• Daily lunch and snacks in office.
• Company retreats.

Pay

Competitive pay with a base salary range for this position of $205,000 - $305,000 depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location.

Schedule

Not specified.