Principal Customer Reliability Engineer

Accela•Birmingham, AL

1d•$160,000 - $190,000•Remote

About The Position

As a Principal Customer Reliability Engineer, you will serve as the primary technical liaison between Accela's cloud platform and our customers, ensuring reliable, secure, and predictable outcomes across production environments. You will partner closely with Site Reliability Engineering, Product, Support, Professional Services, and Engineering teams to guide customers through SaaS migrations, troubleshoot complex technical challenges, and improve operational performance. This role combines deep technical expertise with customer engagement and strategic influence. You will help customers successfully adopt and operate Accela's platform while driving continuous improvements in reliability, observability, incident response, and service delivery. Your focus is on reducing customer impact, improving operational resilience, and building long-term confidence in the platform.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in Production Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Operations, Technical Support Engineering, or related SaaS environments, including customer-facing or escalation leadership responsibilities.
Strong customer focus and demonstrated ability to communicate effectively with both technical and business stakeholders.
Hands-on experience operating and supporting SaaS platforms on Microsoft Azure.
Experience with Kubernetes and modern containerized environments.
Strong experience using observability and monitoring tools, including APM platforms, distributed tracing, logging, and metrics solutions.
Deep troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis expertise across application, infrastructure, networking, operating system, and database layers.
Working knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code concepts and tools, particularly Terraform.
Experience developing automation and operational tooling using Python, PowerShell, Bash, or similar scripting languages.
Demonstrated ability to lead Incident, Problem, and Change Management processes during high-severity customer escalations.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting technical information to customer leadership and executive stakeholders.
Experience using Git and GitHub-based workflows.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading SaaS migrations, cloud transformations, or large-scale customer onboarding initiatives.
Experience supporting SaaS platforms operating under SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, or PCI-DSS compliance frameworks.
Prior software development or systems engineering experience.
Experience supporting database, infrastructure, or datacenter migration projects.
Experience supporting pre-sales activities, technical account management, or customer enablement programs.
Experience conducting production readiness reviews, reliability assessments, or operational risk evaluations.
Experience leveraging AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or other LLM-based solutions to improve diagnostics, automation, and customer communications.
Strong Linux systems administration experience alongside Microsoft Windows expertise.

Responsibilities

Serve as the customer-facing technical representative for Accela's SaaS Operations organization, partnering with Engineering, SRE, Database Engineering, Product, Professional Services, and Support teams to ensure customer success.
Lead technical engagements related to SaaS implementations, migrations, and ongoing production operations, ensuring reliable and predictable outcomes for customers.
Partner with Professional Services and Support teams to identify technical requirements, define migration strategies, and facilitate successful transitions into steady-state operations.
Develop and improve operational processes, tooling, monitoring, metrics, and alerting capabilities that support customer onboarding, migrations, and ongoing platform reliability.
Act as a senior escalation point for complex customer issues, leveraging observability tools, application performance monitoring, log analysis, distributed tracing, and metrics to diagnose and resolve production concerns.
Lead cross-functional response efforts for critical customer-impacting incidents and implementation challenges, coordinating stakeholders to drive timely resolution.
Partner with customers to establish reliability expectations, communicate service-level commitments, and provide guidance regarding operational risk and change management practices.
Collaborate with Sales, Professional Services, and Support teams to communicate Accela's service management processes, cloud operations practices, and compliance posture, including SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and PCI-DSS requirements.
Provide customer-driven insights and feedback to Product, Engineering, and SRE teams to improve platform reliability, usability, and operational effectiveness.
Support pre-sales and customer expansion activities by providing technical expertise related to reliability, architecture, cloud operations, and compliance.
Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and best-practice guidance to Customer Reliability Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, and other technical teams.