Director of Site Reliability Engineering, Salesforce

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical field; Master’s degree or MBA preferred
• 10+ years of progressive engineering experience, including 5+ years in engineering leadership managing SRE, Platform, or Systems Engineering teams
• Proven experience building or transforming a reliability or operational engineering organization
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud architecture, application architecture, networking, infrastructure, and software delivery
• Experience establishing observability, incident-management, service-level objective, and production-readiness practices
• Demonstrated ability to improve reliability through engineering and automation rather than process alone
• Proven experience leading teams responsible for highly available, customer-facing, or business-critical systems
• Strong understanding of modern telemetry, including metrics, logs, distributed tracing, synthetic monitoring, and real-user monitoring
• Demonstrated success driving alignment and building consensus across cross-functional engineering teams and executive stakeholders
• Ability to balance immediate operational needs with long-term engineering transformation
• Strong written, verbal, and executive communication skills

Desirable

• We are looking for a Director of Site Reliability Engineering to spearhead the evolution of our reliability, observability, and operational engineering capabilities
• In this role, you will transform our SRE function—moving our engineering organization from reactive incident response to a proactive, automated, and data-driven reliability culture. Partnering closely across Application Engineering, Platform, Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, and Product, you will ensure our services are resilient, observable, scalable, and production-ready long before they launch
• As an impactful people leader with sharp technical judgment, you will directly manage and empower a core team of ~6 engineers while driving cross-functional alignment across a complex organization. You won't just run existing playbooks; you will define the strategy, tooling, automation, and culture needed to mentor your team and scale system reliability enterprise-wide
• SRE Strategy and Leadership
• Define and execute the long-term strategy and roadmap for Site Reliability Engineering
• Establish a clear operating model for SRE, including team scope, engagement models, ownership boundaries, and success measures
• Build and develop a high-performing team of site reliability and operations engineers
• Modernize the SRE function through automation, AI-assisted operations, self-service capabilities, and engineering-first practices
• Translate business priorities and customer impact into clear reliability investments and engineering outcomes
• Advise senior technology leaders on operational risk, resilience, capacity, and reliability tradeoffs
• Reliability Engineering
• Establish service-level indicators, service-level objectives, error budgets, and reliability standards for critical services
• Partner with engineering teams to design reliability, scalability, recoverability, and graceful degradation into systems
• Define what it means for a service to be operationally and observably ready for production
• Develop readiness reviews and certification practices for high-impact services and launches
• Drive improvements in system availability, performance, resiliency, and recovery
• Ensure reliability requirements are incorporated throughout the software development lifecycle rather than addressed only after deployment
• Observability
• Define an enterprise observability strategy spanning metrics, logs, traces, events, synthetics, real-user monitoring, and business telemetry
• Establish common instrumentation, telemetry, dashboards, alerting, and service-health standards
• Reduce fragmented or duplicative observability implementations by promoting shared patterns and reusable capabilities
• Improve end-to-end visibility across distributed systems, customer journeys, services, and infrastructure
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure telemetry is actionable, contextual, and tied to customer and business outcomes
• Establish governance and measurement to assess adoption and effectiveness of observability standards
• Incident Management and Operational Excellence
• Improve incident detection, response, mitigation, communication, and learning
• Lead the transition from manual and reactive operations toward automated detection, diagnosis, remediation, and incident creation
• Reduce mean time to detect, acknowledge, mitigate, and recover
• Improve on-call practices, escalation paths, runbooks, and operational ownership
• Establish blameless post-incident review practices that produce measurable engineering improvements
• Identify recurring sources of operational toil and create plans to eliminate or automate them
• Partner with engineering leaders to ensure actions from incidents are prioritized and completed
• Automation and AI-Enabled Operations
• Develop a roadmap for intelligent operations, including anomaly detection, event correlation, automated triage, assisted root-cause analysis, and remediation
• Evaluate opportunities to use agents and AI-assisted workflows across observability, incident response, capacity planning, and operational support
• Build automation that reduces cognitive load and improves the speed and consistency of operational decisions
• Ensure automation is safe, measurable, auditable, and designed with appropriate human oversight
• Promote platform and self-service approaches that allow product teams to adopt reliability practices with minimal friction
• Cross-Functional Partnership
• Partner with engineering, DevOps, and business stakeholders
• Influence teams that do not directly report into SRE and build shared accountability for production outcomes
• Create clear service ownership models and operational expectations across teams
• Support major launches and critical business events through readiness planning, risk assessment, testing, and operational coordination
• Communicate reliability posture, risks, trends, and investments to executive and technical audiences
• Measures of Success
• Improved availability and reliability of critical services
• Reduced time to detect, diagnose, mitigate, and recover from incidents
• Increased percentage of services meeting observability and production-readiness standards
• Reduced alert noise, operational toil, and manual incident-management activity
• Increased adoption of service-level objectives and measurable reliability practices
• Improved quality and completion rate of post-incident corrective actions
• Increased automation across detection, triage, remediation, and operational workflows
• Stronger ownership of production reliability across engineering teams
• Leadership Attributes
• Engineering-first and automation-oriented
• Comfortable challenging legacy operating models and assumptions
• Able to move between technical detail and executive-level strategy
• Outcome-focused, pragmatic, and data-driven
• Builds trust through clarity, accountability, and strong partnership
• Develops leaders and creates an inclusive, high-performance engineering culture
• Treats incidents as opportunities to improve systems rather than assign blame
• Brings urgency to operational risks while maintaining focus on sustainable solutions