Manager of Reliability Operations

Nexcess•Southfield, MI

3d•$110,000 - $150,000•Remote

About The Position

We’re looking for a Manager of Reliability Operations to lead how we detect, respond to, and learn from failures across our platform ecosystem. This role sits at the intersection of Operations and Engineering, bringing structure to incident response, accountability to follow-through, and clarity to reliability insights. You’ll ensure that what we learn from production directly improves how our platforms are built, operated, and scaled.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
7+ experience in systems operations, site reliability, or platform engineering
2+ years experience leading teams or major operational functions
Proven experience managing incidents in a 24/7 production environment
Strong background in troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and operational improvement
Experience with change management practices
Platform & Tooling Experience
Monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic)
Incident management and alerting tools (e.g., PagerDuty, Opsgenie)
Infrastructure and platform technologies (Linux systems, VMware, Ceph, cloud platforms)
Logging and telemetry systems (centralized logging, metrics, tracing)
Ability to translate complex technical data into clear insights
Strong communication skills, especially in high-pressure situations

Nice To Haves

Background in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
Experience in managed hosting, cloud infrastructure, or SaaS environments
Experience defining and tracking system reliability and performance targets
Familiarity with ITIL or similar operational frameworks
Exposure to VMware, Ceph, Linux, and Windows platforms
Relevant certifications (AWS, RHCE, etc.)

Responsibilities

Own Reliability Operations & Incident Command
Continuously evolve and improve incident management, change management, and post-incident practices
Establish clear standards for incident declaration, severity, escalation, and communication
Ensure consistent execution across teams and continuous process improvement
Own the incident command function, including roles, structure, and operating procedures
Lead or oversee major incident response in a 24/7 production environment
Build and manage on-call incident commander rotations with global coverage
Drive Learning, Accountability & Reliability Strategy
Own post-incident reviews, ensuring strong root cause analysis and clear documentation
Translate incident trends into actionable reliability improvements
Drive completion of corrective actions across teams; escalate when needed
Define and maintain service performance and reliability targets (availability, latency, error rates)
Own observability strategy, including monitoring, alerting, and signal quality
Improve detection, reduce time to resolution, and increase platform resilience
Partner with Engineering and Operations on capacity planning, patching, and lifecycle decisions
Ensure reliability insights directly inform platform and infrastructure roadmaps
Collaborate with Security on vulnerability response, patch prioritization, and compliance alignment
Operate Across a Complex Platform Environment
Work across environments including virtualization platforms (VMware), distributed storage (Ceph), Linux-based systems, and hybrid cloud infrastructure
Support platforms that span dedicated hosting, managed applications, and high-availability cloud services
Ensure reliability practices scale across multiple products, brands, and customer environments
Provide regular, data-driven reporting to leadership on availability, incident trends, and operational performance
Act as the central authority on reliability insights across teams