Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Walgreens • Deerfield, IL

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Director, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a senior technical and people leader responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, scalability, and performance of critical enterprise platforms and services. This role leads the SRE organization, setting the strategy and operating model for reliability engineering practices across cloud and on-premise environments. This leader partners closely with Engineering, Infrastructure, Architecture, Security, and Product teams to reduce operational risk, improve system resilience, and enable teams to deliver high-quality services at scale. The Director drives adoption of SRE principles including service level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, observability, automation, and incident management excellence, while building a strong culture of ownership, learning, and continuous improvement. Outcomes directed have a moderate to significant impact on the organization’s short- and long-term results, customer experience, and operational stability. Decisions have moderate to significant impact across technology platforms and services.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field OR equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure, SRE, or operations roles with increasing scope and complexity.
• 5+ years of people leadership experience, including leading managers or senior technical leaders.
• Demonstrated experience operating and scaling highly available, distributed systems in cloud or hybrid environments.
• Strong background in incident management, reliability engineering practices, and production operations.
• At least 5 years of experience contributing to financial decisions in the workplace.
• At least 5 years of direct leadership, indirect leadership and/or cross functional team leadership.
• Willing to travel up to/at least 10% of the time for business purposes (within state and out of state).

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Experience implementing SRE practices at enterprise scale.
• Deep knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., Azure), containerization, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience with modern observability platforms and automation frameworks.
• Proven ability to influence senior leaders and drive cultural change toward reliability and operational ownership.

Responsibilities

• Leads and develops a team of Site Reliability Engineers, including managers and senior technical leaders, fostering a culture of accountability, learning, and operational excellence.
• Defines and executes the enterprise SRE strategy, aligning reliability goals with business priorities and technology roadmaps.
• Establishes clear ownership models, engagement patterns, and operating rhythms between SRE, Engineering, and Infrastructure teams.
• Builds organizational capability through hiring, coaching, succession planning, and skills development.
• Oversees the reliability, availability, and performance of mission critical platforms and services across cloud and hybrid environments.
• Drives the definition, adoption, and monitoring of service level indicators (SLIs), service level objectives (SLOs), and error budgets.
• Leads efforts to improve incident response, root cause analysis, and post incident learning to reduce repeat issues and operational toil.
• Ensures effective on call models, escalation paths, and operational readiness practices are in place.
• Champions automation to reduce manual work, improve recovery times, and increase system scalability and resilience.
• Oversees observability capabilities, including monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and dashboards, to proactively detect and resolve issues.
• Partners with Engineering and Architecture to influence system design for reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance.
• Drives continuous improvement in deployment safety, capacity planning, and change management practices.
• Collaborates with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, and Vendor partners to balance innovation velocity with operational stability.
• Provides executive level visibility into reliability posture, risks, trends, and improvement initiatives.
• Influences standards, policies, and best practices related to reliability, availability, and operational excellence.

Benefits

• To review benefits, please click here jobs.walgreens.com/benefits. If you are applying on a job board or unable to click on the link, please copy and paste this URL into your browser jobs.walgreens.com/bene

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director