Director, Site Reliability Engineer

AssetMark•Charlotte, NC

25d•$180,000 - $219,000•Hybrid

About The Position

AssetMark is seeking a strategic, technically strong Director of Service/Site Reliability Engineering and Observability to lead reliability, monitoring, performance, and operational excellence for an enterprise environment hosted exclusively on Microsoft Azure. The Director will own the strategy and operating model for SRE and observability across Azure IaaS and native Azure managed services, spanning real-time applications, APIs, virtual machines, containers, serverless workloads, integrations, databases, messaging platforms, data pipelines, and batch-processing systems. The role combines enterprise leadership, Azure architecture knowledge, application-development experience, production troubleshooting expertise, and the ability to build scalable practices that improve availability, performance, resilience, security, and customer experience. The Director will partner with application development, cloud infrastructure, security, architecture, data, service management, and business teams to ensure Azure-hosted systems are observable, supportable, secure, resilient, and production-ready. The position requires a hybrid work schedule and proximity to AssetMark’s Charlotte, North Carolina office. AssetMark provides investment, relationship, and practice-management solutions to independent financial advisors. Its mission is to help more than 10,500 financial advisors make a meaningful difference in their clients’ lives, supported by technology, holistic support, and expert consulting.

Requirements

At least 7 years of experience in an enterprise technology environment, including experience supporting production systems at scale.
Progressive experience leading SRE, observability, production engineering, monitoring, platform operations, or related functions.
Demonstrated success developing and implementing an enterprise observability strategy.
Experience operating and supporting workloads hosted on both Azure IaaS and native Azure services.
Strong experience with real-time monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards, distributed tracing, event management, and service-health reporting.
Experience with Azure observability capabilities such as Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, Azure Managed Grafana, Activity Logs, Resource Health, or comparable technologies.
Experience supporting highly available, customer-facing, transaction-processing, or business-critical systems.
Strong understanding of application architecture, software-development practices, APIs, databases, integrations, messaging, and distributed systems.
Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex production issues across application, Azure platform, infrastructure, data, network, identity, and third-party dependency layers.
Direct experience with batch systems, scheduled processing, data pipelines, job dependencies, recovery procedures, and time-sensitive enterprise workloads.
Experience defining and managing SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, availability targets, performance objectives, and operational metrics.
Strong background in incident command, major incident management, root-cause analysis, problem management, and continuous improvement.
Experience driving automation, self-service, runbook development, infrastructure as code, CI/CD improvements, or automated remediation.
Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives and influence teams without direct authority.
Excellent written, verbal, analytical, and executive-communication skills.
Legally authorized to work in the United States; visa sponsorship is not available.
Able to accommodate a hybrid work schedule and be close to the Charlotte, North Carolina office.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading SRE or observability functions in a large-scale Microsoft Azure enterprise environment.
Experience with Azure landing zones, management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, Azure Policy, role-based access control, managed identities, networking, private endpoints, and shared platform services.
Familiarity with Azure Kubernetes Service, App Service, Functions, Service Bus, Event Grid, Logic Apps, Azure Storage, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Data Factory, Synapse, and related managed services.
Experience with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Bicep, ARM templates, Terraform, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud-native deployment practices.
Familiarity with observability tools such as Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Elastic, or comparable platforms.
Knowledge of performance engineering, capacity management, high-availability architecture, disaster recovery, and resilience engineering.
Experience modernizing legacy monitoring environments or consolidating multiple observability platforms within Azure.
Experience managing technology budgets, vendor relationships, licensing, and platform strategy.
Familiarity with ITIL, SRE, DevOps, Agile, or other service-management and engineering frameworks.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Responsibilities

Define and execute an enterprise-wide SRE and observability strategy aligned with business priorities, technology objectives, and risk-management requirements.
Establish standards for telemetry, service ownership, instrumentation, dashboards, alerting, and data retention, and develop a multi-year roadmap for Azure observability, reliability engineering, automation, resilience, and operational maturity.
Define service-level indicators, objectives and agreements, error budgets, availability targets, latency objectives, performance standards, and operational-readiness requirements.
Evaluate and govern observability platforms, tools, vendors, integrations, licensing, access, security, and operating costs.
Lead reliability and observability practices across Azure IaaS and native services, and establish Azure-native monitoring and telemetry standards.
Ensure end-to-end visibility across application, infrastructure, platform, network, identity, security, data, and third-party dependencies.
Partner with cloud platform and architecture teams to improve the reliability of Azure subscriptions, management groups, networking, identity, access controls, policies, and shared services.
Lead real-time monitoring for business-critical applications, customer-facing services, APIs, Azure infrastructure, databases, networks, messaging systems, and integrations.
Improve alert quality and actionability while reducing alert fatigue and unnecessary escalations; create executive, operational, and engineering dashboards.
Establish on-call, escalation, incident response, major incident management, and service-restoration practices.
Participate in root-cause analysis, problem management, post-incident reviews, and corrective-action tracking; proactively detect reliability, capacity, performance, security, and availability risks.
Develop runbooks, playbooks, automated remediation, self-healing capabilities, and other mechanisms to reduce manual intervention and accelerate recovery.
Use Azure telemetry and operational data to identify trends, dependencies, recurring failures, and continuous-improvement opportunities.
Partner with application-development teams to improve instrumentation, diagnosability, performance, resilience, and production supportability.
Provide technical leadership during complex production issues and troubleshoot across application code, APIs, microservices, middleware, databases, queues, files, integrations, Azure services, and infrastructure.
Promote observability throughout the software-development lifecycle and support performance engineering, profiling, capacity planning, release readiness, and production validation.
Ensure reliable operation and monitoring of scheduled jobs, batch processes, data pipelines, file transfers, reporting processes, and other time-sensitive Azure workloads.
Establish visibility into batch dependencies, job duration, success and failure rates, late starts, missed schedules, data-quality issues, retries, restarts, and downstream impacts.
Define recovery, restart, reconciliation, and escalation procedures for failed or delayed batch processes, and partner with application, data, and business teams to protect service levels.
Improve availability, scalability, recoverability, and fault tolerance across Azure-hosted enterprise platforms.
Lead capacity planning, performance monitoring, resilience testing, disaster-recovery readiness, business-continuity improvements, and assessment of Azure-region, availability-zone, managed-service, and application resiliency.
Identify single points of failure, operational dependencies, unsupported services, configuration risks, technology debt, and other reliability risks.
Partner with security and compliance teams to ensure monitoring, logging, access, retention, and incident practices meet enterprise requirements.
Lead, mentor, and develop SRE, observability, production engineering, and monitoring professionals; build team structure, ownership boundaries, escalation paths, career development, and engineering standards.
Recruit and retain technical talent and establish a culture of automation, accountability, continuous improvement, learning, and blameless problem solving.
Communicate reliability posture, operational risks, major incidents, investment needs, and improvement plans to senior technology and business leaders.
Manage strategic vendor relationships, budgets, contracts, and technology investments as appropriate.