Technical Product Manager II, Site Reliability Engineering

Mission Overview & Responsibilities

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. This role focuses on leading reliability programs and platforms that ensure teams ship resilient systems with confidence.

• Operational Readiness and Always Ready – reliability models, scorecards, production readiness reviews, and reliability signals that support operating reviews and critical customer journeys.
• Load, Chaos & Disaster Recovery Testing – platforms and practices that validate how systems behave under high traffic, zonal or regional failures, and degraded conditions.
• Observability & Incident Readiness – opinionated defaults for metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks that improve detection, diagnosis, and on-call quality.

About the Team

SRE at The Times is an enablement team: we improve on reliability through education, tooling, and hands-on operational support, not by building everything ourselves.

• We operate in a large, distributed company. We rely on clear, and constant communication, which includes crisp written updates, well-maintained tickets and docs, and proactive status sharing, so partners always know what's happening.
• We expect SREs (and you) to take product-level ownership of engagements and programs, keep work moving, and be comfortable operating independently.
• We learn by doing: running load and chaos tests, iterating on dashboards and scorecards, and using outcomes to refine our approach rather than over-planning up front.
• We treat engagements as collaborative problem-solving, meeting teams where they are, respecting their ownership, and leaving them more capable than when we arrived.
• We care about metrics-driven reliability. These signals include SLOs, reliability scores, test results, MTTR/MTTD. We use them to guide decisions, measure the impact, and feed programs like Always Ready.
• We believe reliability is a shared responsibility, and we create clear, supportive pathways for teams to improve their services without having to become experts in every SRE domain.

Responsibilities

• Build and communicate the product roadmap for SRE-led reliability programs (operational maturity, Always On signals, load/chaos testing, observability), aligning them with newsroom and product priorities.
• Turn ambiguous reliability problems into concrete products and engagements by doing discovery with engineers and leaders, defining scope and success metrics, and treating SRE collaborations as internal consulting engagements with clear contracts and exit criteria.
• Shape the direction of testing and observability platforms by prioritizing high-value scenarios, such as BNAs, elections, and major launches. Ensure that load and chaos tests map to customer journeys, and tie the results directly to SLOs, dashboards, and runbooks.
• Use data to guide iteration and storytelling. Use incident metrics, test outcomes, and reliability scores to refine roadmaps and report on impact.
• Experience communicating complex technical concepts to a variety of audiences, including SRE, partner teams, and senior leadership, about tradeoffs and progress.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of product management experience in platform, infrastructure, SRE, or other technical domains, with experience building roadmaps for multi-team, multi-system products or programs.
• Working knowledge of SRE practices and operational readiness (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incident response and review, production readiness, on-call quality) and how they show up in services.
• Experience with testing and observability in cloud-native environments - for example, shaping or supporting load / performance / chaos testing and working with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerts.
• Translate systems data (reliability, performance) to prioritize and evaluate work, and to explain complex technical concepts and tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with SRE, Platform, or Infrastructure teams, especially in enablement or engagement models (embeds, consulting-style projects, or Always Ready-like programs).
• Experience defining or scaling operational readiness frameworks and production readiness reviews, and driving adoption of standards across multiple teams.
• Experience operating observability platforms at scale - we use Datadog, but experience with any enterprise observability tool will do.
• Experience with cloud providers and Kubernetes (AWS, GCP, or Azure) to understand how reliability and observability tradeoffs show up in practice, and to hold informed conversations with engineers operating those systems.