Site Reliability Engineering Team Lead (Principal SRE)

Cerence•Montreal, QC

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Site Reliability Engineering Team Lead (Principal SRE) leads Cerence's Site Reliability Engineering team, owning the reliability, availability, and operational health of our cloud-native automotive AI platform. This role combines technical leadership of the team and the function with deep technical credibility: you will help select and mentor the team, define the reliability roadmap, govern SLI/SLO/SLA targets, and champion a blameless culture. You will serve as the Tier 2 technical escalation point for major incidents, partner with development leadership to embed reliability into the SDLC, and set strategic direction for observability and automation. This is a Principal-level role on our technical track, with no direct reports: you lead the team and own the function through technical authority. The ideal candidate brings a strong hands-on background in SRE, cloud platforms, and container orchestration, and a track record of leading site reliability teams.

Requirements

8+ years of hands-on experience in site reliability, DevOps, or cloud platform roles, including time leading a team or owning a function
A track record of setting technical direction and holding standards across a team — with or without formal authority
Hands-on experience with container orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes, Docker, Istio)
Experience with public cloud platforms (Azure primarily; AWS and Google Cloud)
Familiarity with observability tooling — metrics pipelines, dashboarding, and alerting (e.g., Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana)
Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices (e.g., Terraform, Flux)
Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language (Python, Go, Shell, etc.)
Strong UNIX/Linux background, including system configuration, performance debugging, and network fundamentals (Layer 4/5, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS)
Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English

Nice To Haves

Previous site reliability leadership experience
Experience leading distributed or multi-site technical teams
Background in high-availability service design (redundancy, failover, blast radius)
Experience with log aggregation and analytics platforms (Loki, Thanos)
Familiarity with ITSM and project tooling (Jira, Confluence)
Experience in automotive, embedded, or latency-sensitive production environments

Responsibilities

Help select, mentor, and technically develop the team, across multiple locations
Set technical direction and priorities for the team, and contribute performance and growth input to their managers
Design and maintain a sustainable on-call rotation; monitor page load and team health as first-class concerns
Own and drive the team's reliability roadmap across a 2–3 quarter horizon
Define and govern SLI/SLO/SLA frameworks to hold the contracted availability targets for our customer programs, which run as high as 99.95%
Serve as the Tier 2 technical escalation point for major incidents, partnering with the Global Operations Center, which owns incident management and response
Champion blameless postmortem culture — model it, reinforce it, and ensure it produces actionable outcomes
Lead and continuously improve Production Readiness / NFR reviews with development teams
Contribute to root cause analysis and own the systemic improvements that come out of it
Act as a named approver for high-risk and out-of-window production change
Set the strategic direction for metrics, dashboards, and alerting across SLI/SLO, escalation, and automation layers
Drive development and adoption of CI/CD automation pipelines for service deployments, rollbacks, and operational tasks
Partner with DevOps and platform teams to evolve shared infrastructure
Partner with development managers and architects to embed reliability into the SDLC by default
Participate in service reliability consulting and architectural reviews
Communicate reliability posture and risk clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders