Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering

ServiceNow • University, FL

8h

About The Position

ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering to build and lead an SRE organization across its observability and control plane product portfolios. This program-building role will establish reliability programs across internal platforms and commercial products, including SRE strategy, operational standards, team structures, practices, and tooling. The role will drive measurable organizational and people transformation and foster a reliability-first culture.

The Senior Director will define a multi-year SRE roadmap, establish reliability frameworks, and lead hiring, mentorship, career development, incident management, and operational excellence. The role will define and operationalize SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets; advance AI-native toil reduction and automation; and partner with product, platform, infrastructure, customer success, support, security, and compliance teams. The position reports to the VP of Engineering and works across multiple business units.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or reliability engineering at scale.
• 5+ years in leadership roles as a director or principal engineer managing SRE or reliability teams of 10 or more engineers.
• Demonstrated success building SRE programs from scratch or scaling immature programs, with measurable business impact.
• Evidence of driving people and organizational transformation and shifting teams from reactive to proactive reliability.
• Deep expertise in SRE practices, including SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems, on-call design, and toil reduction.
• Hands-on experience with observability platforms covering metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting.
• Experience operating both internal platforms and commercial SaaS products.
• Ability to establish standards and drive adoption in multi-team, multi-product environments.
• Hands-on SRE expertise, including the ability to code, debug, and architect solutions alongside a team.
• Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, and telemetry infrastructure.
• Familiarity with multiple deployment models, cloud platforms, and operational challenges.
• Data-driven decision-making using SLOs, metrics, and evidence-based practices.
• Cross-functional influencing skills and ability to drive change without direct authority.
• Bias toward action and iteration, including comfort making decisions with incomplete information.
• Ability to define a charter, secure stakeholder buy-in, and execute a multi-year strategy from concept to maturity.
• Comfort with ambiguity and building in greenfield environments.
• Ability to make reliability a shared responsibility across an organization.
• Strong coaching and mentorship skills.
• Excellent communication skills for explaining reliability concepts to engineers, product managers, and executives.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with control plane architectures or platform-as-a-service systems.
• Experience building SRE programs in hybrid or multi-cloud deployments.
• Track record of mentoring and developing SRE or platform leaders.
• Familiarity with chaos engineering, reliability testing, or resilience frameworks.
• Open-source contributions or thought leadership in the SRE community.

Responsibilities

• Build an SRE program from the ground up, defining its charter, operating model, hiring strategy, and multi-year roadmap.
• Establish SRE principles, practices, and standards across observability products and control plane offerings.
• Create unified reliability frameworks for internal-facing and customer-facing systems.
• Design SRE on-call rotations, incident response processes, and a blameless postmortem culture.
• Build and scale an SRE team across observability and control plane domains.
• Develop hiring criteria and interview processes for SRE talent.
• Create mentorship and career development paths and foster continuous learning.
• Drive organizational transformation toward reliability-first mindsets across product and infrastructure teams.
• Establish SRE career levels, expectations, and growth frameworks.
• Define and operationalize SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for observability and control plane products.
• Build AI-native toil reduction initiatives and automate repetitive operational work.
• Own incident management, including escalation policies, postmortem practices, and continuous improvement loops.
• Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to improve reliability infrastructure, including CI/CD, deployment systems, and monitoring.
• Establish reliability metrics, dashboards, and leadership reporting.
• Partner with product teams to embed SRE thinking in feature design and development.
• Work with observability leadership to tailor SRE programs to internal and commercial product strategies.
• Collaborate with customer success and support on customer-facing reliability and SLA/SLO communication.
• Partner with infrastructure and platform teams on shared services, runbooks, and operational tooling.
• Engage with security and compliance teams on reliability-related governance and risk.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity package
• Comprehensive health, wellness, and retirement benefits
• Unlimited PTO
• Flexible work arrangements
• Leadership coaching and executive development
• Opportunity to build a world-class SRE organization and shape reliability culture across critical product lines

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed