Lead Site Reliability Engineer

This role sits in the core Platform/SRE team that owns production. You'll lead a small SRE team today, growing it as Heidi scales, while staying hands-on in incident response, on-call, system reliability, and day-to-day operations. We're looking for someone who has already built or scaled a reliability team, not someone stepping into management for the first time. You'll set the standard for how the team operates, hire and structure it as headcount grows, and represent SRE in conversations with engineering leadership. The role stays ops-heavy: you're expected to be in the systems yourself, not just running a roadmap from a distance.

Responsibilities

Participate in on-call and incident response. Respond to production incidents, contribute to service restoration, and keep communication clear while things are on fire. Lead incidents end-to-end, including the ones outside your immediate team.; Improve operational reliability. Spot recurring issues and reliability risks, then drive fixes through better alerting, automation, system changes, or process improvements.; Own the production environment. Operate and improve Kubernetes clusters, cloud infrastructure, and core platform services across the team's remit.; Strengthen observability. Build dashboards, alerts, logs, and traces that surface issues earlier and cut diagnosis time, with a bias toward signals people can actually act on.; Reduce operational toil. Automate the repetitive stuff, simplify runbooks, and improve tooling so on-call and daily operations get easier and safer over time.; Support safe change. Improve deployments, rollback mechanisms, and operational readiness so shipping changes doesn't mean rolling the dice on an incident.; Contribute to operational practices. Write and maintain runbooks, run blameless post-mortems, and raise the bar on incident response as the team learns.; Collaborate closely with engineers. Partner with product and feature teams on production readiness, service ownership, and what "reliable" should mean for their systems.; Lead and grow the SRE team. Manage the team you inherit day to day, then hire and onboard as Heidi scales. Own on-call structure, career development, and team norms as headcount grows.; Shape the team's direction. Decide where the team invests next, balance reliability work against team capacity, and represent SRE in planning with engineering leadership.

Requirements

7+ years in SRE, DevOps, platform, or operations-heavy engineering roles, including experience formally leading or managing a team.; A track record of hiring, coaching, and growing engineers, not just leading incidents solo.; Deep experience supporting production systems, including on-call rotations, and the credibility to still jump into an incident yourself.; You're comfortable debugging live systems under pressure.; Strong experience operating cloud infrastructure at scale (AWS preferred).; Solid hands-on experience with Kubernetes and containerized workloads in production.; Infrastructure as code experience (Terraform or similar).; Hands-on experience with monitoring and alerting tools such as Datadog or Prometheus, including designing alerting strategy, not just consuming dashboards.; Scripting or automation experience in Python, Bash, or similar.; Hands-on experience defining and owning SLOs, error budgets, and capacity planning, not just familiarity with the concepts.

Nice to have

Experience scaling a team through fast headcount growth, not just steady-state management.; Experience in regulated or security-sensitive environments.; Familiarity with databases, queues, and caches in production.

Benefits

$1,000 annual learning and development budget; $150/month health and wellness allowance; $500 home office budget; 26 weeks paid primary parental leave; 18 weeks paid secondary parental leave; fertility support up to $10,000; four weeks of work from anywhere per year; serious equity