Director of Site Reliability Engineering

Stellar Development Foundation•San Francisco, CA

6d•$210,000 - $310,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is seeking a Director of Site Reliability Engineering to lead a small, high-leverage SRE team. This senior engineering leadership role reports to the CTO and is responsible for setting the vision, operating model, and culture for SRE. The role involves owning core infrastructure services that enable engineering teams to build, deploy, observe, and operate software with confidence. SDF emphasizes strong service ownership, and the SRE team provides the necessary frameworks, standards, shared infrastructure, tooling, observability practices, and enablement to support this. The ideal candidate will possess strong technical judgment, pragmatic leadership, and the ability to influence through trust, clarity, and execution. This role requires leverage, ownership, and a focus on solving the right problems efficiently in a mission-driven foundation with a broad technical surface area.

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.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or platform work in a lean, high-agency organization.
Experience supporting globally distributed teams or 24/7 operational coverage.
Experience improving developer productivity through paved paths, self-service infrastructure, automation, and reduced toil.
Experience with infrastructure security fundamentals, secrets management, access controls, cloud security practices, or compliance-related infrastructure controls.
Experience in financial services, regulated environments, blockchain, crypto, Web3, or other high-reliability technical ecosystems.
Experience evaluating vendors and infrastructure platforms with skepticism, technical rigor, and cost discipline.
Practical experience applying AI-assisted or agentic workflows to infrastructure, reliability, operations, observability, or developer productivity.

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.
Make reliability, operational maturity, infrastructure health, and developer productivity more measurable through trusted metrics and practical operational intelligence.
Improve deployment automation, resilience, self-healing patterns, disaster recovery readiness, and service reliability based on actual impact and risk.
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.

Benefits

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