Sr. Manager - SRE

Backblaze External Website

8h•$178,000 - $210,000

About The Position

Backblaze is seeking a Senior Manager to lead within its Site Reliability Engineering organization and help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of production systems. The role calls for an experienced leader who can develop engineering strategies, lead high-performing technical teams, and translate reliability priorities into measurable outcomes. The Senior Manager will work across the organization with engineering leaders, executives, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders to advance reliability and operational goals. The work focuses on enabling engineers through observability, automation, operational excellence, and continuous improvement. The role also contributes to resilient system design, reliable production operations, customer-focused stability priorities, and a reliability-focused engineering culture.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, infrastructure, or production operations, including significant engineering leadership experience.
Demonstrated experience building, managing, mentoring, and developing high-performing technical teams.
Experience leading reliability or infrastructure organizations operating large-scale, production-grade systems.
Strong understanding of deploying and managing large fleets of Linux hosts, with emphasis on automation.
Strong knowledge of observability and monitoring technologies such as VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch, or comparable platforms.
Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, incident processes, and reliability practices at scale.
Strong understanding of storage systems, including storage performance, sharding, distributed architectures, and storage algorithms.
Understanding of load-balancing technologies and services, including IPVS or comparable technologies.
Experience managing security-focused infrastructure operations, including patching, hardening, vulnerability identification, and remediation.
Demonstrated ability to lead major incidents and post-incident processes, including root cause analysis and corrective action planning.
Experience using automation and AI-assisted technologies to improve engineering productivity, system performance, operational efficiency, or scalability.
Ability to independently own complex problems and drive initiatives from discovery through resolution.
Strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to work effectively with engineers, executives, customers, vendors, and cross-functional stakeholders.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience operating infrastructure at hyperscale or within a hyperscaler environment.
Experience in SaaS, cloud infrastructure, service provider, storage, or large-scale distributed systems environments.
Experience with object storage or other large-scale storage platforms.
Familiarity with ITIL or OSS operational practices.
Experience defining, managing, and improving SLOs and SLAs.
Experience with AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or other major cloud platforms.
Experience leading teams through significant infrastructure scaling, reliability, or operational transformation initiatives.

Responsibilities

Hire, lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing Site Reliability Engineering team, including coaching, career development, and performance management.
Manage other engineering managers as required and develop leadership capability within the organization.
Establish team goals, objectives, and reliability priorities; deliver commitments or proactively reset expectations when circumstances change.
Collaborate with engineering leaders to define strategic priorities and execution plans.
Develop and improve automation for deploying storage vaults, core servers, and supporting infrastructure.
Own and improve vulnerability management and patching schedules to meet contractual, operational, and security requirements.
Drive complex reliability initiatives from problem discovery through implementation and resolution.
Partner with engineering teams to improve observability, monitoring, and alerting, and provide insight into infrastructure health and performance.
Analyze SLA and reliability performance, identify risks, and drive corrective actions.
Participate in leadership on-call rotations, major incident response, and post-incident reviews.
Provide incident leadership and ensure root cause analyses, corrective actions, and follow-up work are completed.
Apply ITIL and operational processes across incident, change, problem, and capacity management.
Partner with Engineering, Customer Success, Product, and Operations on resilient system design and reliable production operations.
Engage with customers to understand reliability needs and align stability priorities with customer experience and business requirements.
Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot issues and monitor SLA performance.
Lead cross-functional initiatives to identify gaps in observability, operational processes, reliability, and infrastructure management.
Identify recurring operational issues and develop long-term strategies and action plans.
Document systems, share learnings, and promote a reliability-focused engineering culture.