Sr. Manager, Cloud Engineering & Operations

Accela•Birmingham, AL

6h•$180,000 - $200,000•Remote

About The Position

Accela provides cutting-edge technology that empowers government agencies to better serve their communities. At the core of our solutions is the Civic Cloud Platform, enabling a robust ecosystem of development and business partners to deliver innovative public sector services. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Accela blends software engineering with cloud operations to ensure platform reliability, scalability, security, and performance. As Senior Manager, SRE, you will lead a high-performing team responsible for protecting and advancing the availability and resilience of Accela’s Civic Platform Services. This role also oversees our Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) function — a customer-facing SRE discipline focused on successful implementations, complex migrations, and technically challenging integrations. You will partner closely with Engineering, Security, Product, and Customer Success to ensure operational excellence at scale. As part of the Cloud Engineering and Operations leadership team, you will actively shape our Production Development Lifecycle (PDLC), mature our incident and change management practices, and drive strategic improvements across our Azure-based SaaS infrastructure.

Requirements

10–12+ years of experience in software engineering and/or production systems engineering within a SaaS environment
3–5+ years of people leadership experience managing technical teams
Proven track record of building, scaling, and retaining high-performing engineering teams
Strong executive communication skills with experience presenting operational metrics and strategy
Deep expertise in distributed systems, system design, and troubleshooting complex production environments
Experience operating in Microsoft Azure environments
Experience in Linux environments and software version control systems
Strong scripting capability (Bash, Python, Ruby, or Go)
Mastery of production monitoring, logging, and observability tools
Demonstrated ability to lead full-stack incident response and root cause analysis

Nice To Haves

Experience operating containerized platforms (AKS, ECS, or similar) at scale
Azure CLI/API expertise
Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform preferred)
Configuration management experience (Ansible preferred)
PowerShell experience

Responsibilities

Hire, develop, and retain a high-performing team of SREs and CREs
Establish clear performance expectations, career paths, and technical standards
Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
Serve as a mentor to senior engineers and emerging leaders
Own reliability outcomes across availability, performance, security, and compliance
Serve as executive escalation point for high-severity production incidents
Lead incident response strategy, root cause analysis (RCA), and corrective action planning
Mature Incident, Problem, and Change Management processes
Drive automation initiatives in partnership with DevOps, Security, and Database Engineering
Oversee infrastructure scalability and resiliency across Microsoft Azure
Champion Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and configuration management (Ansible) standards
Improve observability through robust dashboards, metrics, logging, and monitoring practices
Partner with Product and Engineering to integrate reliability early in the PDLC
Engage executive leadership with operational metrics, risk posture, and strategic roadmaps
Manage vendor and partner relationships supporting SaaS production environments
Align reliability strategy with business growth and public sector compliance requirements