Manager Site Reliability Engineering

About the role

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to lead the establishment of SRE practices across the organization. This role will involve shaping how reliability engineering is practiced at FHLBank Chicago from the ground up.

Responsibilities

• Shape how Reliability Engineering is practiced and enforced across the Bank through collaboration
• Build deep relationships between IT and the greater organization in support of common goals
• Create psychological safety that enables learning, experimentation, and honest discussion of failures
• Establish career development paths and growth opportunities within the SRE discipline
• Foster a culture of blameless postmortems and continuous improvement
• Define and implement Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budget policies across critical services
• Lead tuning and optimization of monitoring, alerting, and observability tooling
• Drive reduction of system disruptions through automation, tooling, and process improvement
• Develop and maintain incident management processes, including severity classification and escalation procedures
• Participate in FHLBank's Disaster Recovery process and testing, coordinating and executing regularly scheduled DR exercises
• Participate in troubleshooting meetings and production incidents, providing expert guidance and recommendations
• Partner with application owners, product owners, and development teams to improve system reliability
• Ensure deep technical analysis is performed for significant reliability issues, and provide escalation support as needed; coach the team in translating findings into actionable recommendations
• Advocate for reliability investments and help teams prioritize reliability work against feature development
• Build relationships that enable SRE to influence architectural and operational decisions without direct ownership
• Secure and maintain executive sponsorship and governance mechanisms required for SLO and error budget practices (including defined decision rights when reliability thresholds are breached)
• Communicate the value and principles of SRE to leadership, helping secure sustained support and appropriate resource allocation
• Develop metrics and reporting that demonstrate SRE impact on business outcomes
• Navigate organizational dynamics to build credibility and trust for a new function
• Align SRE practices with existing compliance, risk management, and regulatory requirements

Requirements

• 2+ years of Site Reliability Engineering or directly-related primary function
• 5+ years of experience in infrastructure, operations, DevOps
• 2+ years of people management experience, with demonstrated ability to develop and grow technical talent
• Strong technical foundation in systems administration, networking, and infrastructure
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (.NET preferred, Python also valuable)
• Experience with monitoring, observability, and alerting tools and practices
• Proficiency with agentic AI tools such as Github Copilot, Claude Code, or Codex
• Demonstrated ability to influence outcomes without direct authority
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Experience conducting or leading incident response and postmortem processes
• Outstanding communication (verbal, written, and listening) skills
• Pleasant demeanor with others with a good-natured, cooperative attitude
• Experience with Agile methods and concepts
• Knowledge of cloud computing principles, specifically related to Amazon Web Services

Qualifications

• Experience implementing SRE practices in an organization new to the discipline
• Background in financial services or other regulated industries
• Experience defining and implementing SLIs, SLOs, and error budget policies
• Knowledge of ITIL, DevOps, or related frameworks

Skills

• Strong technical foundation in systems administration, networking, and infrastructure
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (.NET preferred, Python also valuable)
• Experience with monitoring, observability, and alerting tools and practices
• Proficiency with agentic AI tools such as Github Copilot, Claude Code, or Codex
• Demonstrated ability to influence outcomes without direct authority
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Experience conducting or leading incident response and postmortem processes
• Outstanding communication (verbal, written, and listening) skills
• Pleasant demeanor with others with a good-natured, cooperative attitude
• Experience with Agile methods and concepts
• Knowledge of cloud computing principles, specifically related to Amazon Web Services

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits program designed to meet the needs of our employees
• Competitive compensation and bonus package
• Retirement program (401k and Pension)
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Lifestyle Spending Account
• PTO plan providing 5 weeks of vacation for new employees and 11 paid holidays per year
• Central downtown location at the Old Post Office providing easy access to public transportation and breathtaking views from our award-winning rooftop

Pay

$125,825.00 - $221,275.00

Schedule

Full-time