Senior Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Walgreens•Deerfield, IL

About The Position

The Senior Director, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an enterprise technology leader responsible for setting the vision, strategy, and operating model for reliability engineering and RunOps across Walgreens Technology. This role is accountable for ensuring the resilience, scalability, and operational integrity of Walgreens’ most critical platforms and services. The Senior Director establishes enterprise wide SRE and RunOps standards, governance, and performance expectations, and partners with engineering, infrastructure, security, architecture, and business leaders to embed reliability into technology strategy and execution. This leader plays a critical role in enabling digital transformation while maintaining high levels of service availability and customer trust. The role reports to a Vice President within Walgreens Technology. Outcomes have a significant impact on enterprise risk, customer experience, operational stability, and long term business performance. Founded in 1901, Walgreens (www.walgreens.com) proudly serves nearly 9 million customers and patients each day across its approximately 8,500 stores throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Walgreens has approximately 220,000 team members, including nearly 90,000 healthcare service providers, and is committed to being the first choice for pharmacy, retail and health services, building trusted relationships that create healthier futures for customers, patients, team members and communities.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree and at least 10 years of progressive IT experience OR High School Diploma / GED and at least 13 years of experience.
At least 7 years of experience leading SRE, operations, infrastructure, or platform organizations.
Proven experience setting enterprise operational strategy and influencing executive decision making.
Strong background in large scale, mission critical environments.
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

Experience leading reliability and operations in highly regulated environments.
Deep experience with cloud platforms, distributed systems, and modern observability tooling.
Experience supporting large scale digital or platform transformation initiatives.

Responsibilities

Defines and owns the enterprise SRE and RunOps strategy, operating model, and roadmap.
Establishes standards for reliability engineering, operational readiness, incident management, and service ownership.
Ensures SRE and RunOps capabilities scale with Walgreens’ technology and business growth.
Accountable for enterprise service reliability, resilience, and recovery outcomes.
Oversees enterprise incident response, crisis management, and major outage communications.
Partners with architecture and security leaders to ensure reliability, resilience, and recoverability are built into platform and solution designs.
Sponsors and governs RunOps processes, ensuring consistent execution across platforms and domains.
Sets expectations for service health reporting, operational KPIs, and continuous improvement.
Aligns operational investment decisions with enterprise risk tolerance and business priorities.
Partners with senior business and technology leaders to balance innovation velocity with operational stability.
Acts as an executive advisor on reliability trade offs, operational risk, and resilience investments.
Represents Walgreens Technology in enterprise forums related to operational excellence and service resilience.
Leads multiple teams and leaders across SRE and RunOps.
Builds leadership capability, succession plans, and a strong culture of accountability and learning.
Champions Walgreens’ purpose, values, and customer first mindset.