SRE Manager, Proton

• Several years of experience managing site reliability, infrastructure, or platform teams
• Experience leading a team from manual operations to automated ones, with results you can describe
• Strong technical judgment on large Linux fleets. You can review a design, read Python and Ansible, and find the gaps in a postmortem
• Experience owning the reliability of a production service, including SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and postmortems
• Experience building or rebuilding the monitoring of a production service, and getting engineers to rely on it
• Experience running physical infrastructure, or a clear willingness to learn it
• Experience developing engineers, giving direct feedback, and addressing underperformance
• Experience delivering projects that depend on teams outside your own
• The habit of setting your own priorities. We will give you goals, and you will decide with the team how to reach them
• Clear writing in strategy documents, incident reports, and engineering standards
• A commitment to privacy. Proton VPN keeps no logs of user activity, and you will have to improve observability within that limit
• Experience operating a fleet across many countries, including the vendor and legal work involved

Desirable

• The VPN Site Reliability Engineering team builds and runs this fleet. It has eight engineers: six site reliability engineers and two engineers who look after day-to-day fleet health
• The fleet runs Debian, is automated with Ansible and Python, and is monitored with Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, and Grafana. The team has kept the service stable through several years of fast growth
• We are hiring an engineering manager to lead this team. You will report to the VPN Engineering Director and work from our Geneva or Barcelona office
• The fleet keeps growing as more people use Proton VPN. To stay ahead of that growth, the team is investing in two areas, and you will lead both:
• 1Automation. Engineers still do much of the provisioning, deployment, and repair work by hand. We want software to do that work, so that a fix or a new location reaches the fleet quickly and safely
• Observability. We know when a server is down. We do not yet know when users in one country are getting poor throughput. We want to find a problem that affects one server or one country while it is still small
• We chose a simple stack on purpose, and we plan to keep it and extend it
• This is a management role, so you will not write production code. You do need to be technical enough to read the team's code, question its designs, and examine its postmortems in detail
• Manage and develop a team of eight engineers
• Decide what the team automates and measures first, and deliver that plan
• Own the reliability of the Proton VPN fleet, including SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and postmortems
• Build monitoring that shows what users experience in each country, starting with throughput
• Replace manual provisioning, deployment, and repair work with tooling that ships changes to the fleet quickly and safely
• Set the engineering standards for the team, and coach engineers to solve operational problems with software
• Plan capacity and new locations with VPN product engineering, Proton's infrastructure teams, and our network and datacenter providers