Senior Engineering Manager, Site Reliability

Horizon3 AI

22h•$260,000 - $280,000•Remote

About The Position

Horizon3.ai is seeking an engineering leader to establish and build the Site Reliability function. This role involves hiring a team, defining operational excellence, and ensuring the company's product and service offerings meet customer and business expectations. The ideal candidate will be responsible for building a team of 4-6 site reliability engineers in the first year, professionalizing incident management processes, and driving a culture of reliability across the engineering organization. The role also includes driving engineering excellence through design and code reviews, and managing a roadmap of observability and reliability initiatives while balancing incident response. As a Manager, responsibilities include recruiting, onboarding, mentoring, coaching, equipping, and developing the team, as well as recognizing and retaining high performers. This role requires leading horizontally with peer Management & Senior Leaders and ensuring the team's success in a remote or distributed environment.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience leading hiring and growing SRE or Infrastructure teams.
Experience leading or building SRE functions, including incident management processes, on-call programs, SLO/SLA definition, and operational runbooks.
Previous career experience as a Site Reliability Engineer. Comfortable in being hands-on while you grow and hire your team.
Deep hands on experience with observability: application performance management, logs and traces, and golden signals and service-specific metrics.
Experience in selecting and deploying incident management tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, FireHydrant,etc.) and creating decision making frameworks for vendor selection.
Strong working knowledge of at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) — infrastructure, networking, managed services, IAM, cost management. AWS preferred.
Experience in design practices like architecture decision records or RFCs in the infrastructure or platform engineering context.
Able to write clear, durable process documentation that engineering teams can adopt.
Experience in providing education and training on runbook development, on-call expectations, incident investigations, and running effective postmortems.
Ability to engage with Product and Engineering leaders to define SLOs and drive culture of ownership across teams.
Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain high-performing engineers and engineering managers in remote or distributed environments.
Proven skills in managing a backlog of strategic roadmap initiatives and a competing stream of operational needs against capacity constraints.
Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
Proven ability to to build, scale, and retain high performing engineering teams in remote or distributed environments.

Responsibilities

Establish an SRE function.
Build a SRE team, from scratch. Hire experienced site reliability staff and build a team of 4-6 in year one.
Professionalize incident management. Define and document incident processes and practices for your SRE team and for the application feature teams. Make tool and vendor decisions to support processes.
Drive incident professionalism and reliability culture across the engineering organization through training and process adoption.
Use design reviews, code reviews, and blameless retrospectives to drive a culture of quality and excellence in engineering.
Balance incident response while also executing on a roadmap of observability and reliability engineering initiatives.
Hire and directly manage site reliability engineers.
Recruiting and onboarding talented individuals to support our organizational goals
Mentoring, coaching, equipping, and developing your team
Recognizing and retaining high performers
Leading horizontally with peer Management & Senior Leaders