Director of Site Reliability Engineering, Invoca
$190-300k
+ Stock options; + Bonus potential
More information about location
AI-powered conversation intelligence platform
Be an early applicant
AI-powered conversation intelligence platform
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$190-300k
+ Stock options; + Bonus potential
More information about location
201-500 employees
Company mission
To enable revenue teams to turn conversation data into automated action to enhance every digital touchpoint and human interaction, leading to better experiences, more conversions, and higher revenue.
Role
Who you are
- You are a former SRE, DevOps engineer, infrastructure architect, or infrastructure-focused software engineer with significant management experience, particularly in a realtime-focused environment
- You’re encouraged to apply if you live by reliability engineering principles and can advocate for better practices on your team and in the wider engineering organization
- 5+ years of hands-on experience in an SRE, DevOps, sysadmin, or infrastructure engineering role
- Have strong opinions coupled with an open mind for infrastructure design, architecture, and automation based on organizational context, experience, and industry practices
- Ability to use understanding of both established systems and general industry direction to help guide strategic decisions
- A breadth of knowledge and best practices in various core infrastructure technologies, particularly those in use at Invoca or similar:
- Cloud computing fundamentals, particularly in AWS & GCP
- Containerization, specifically Docker and Kubernetes via kops
- Linux, especially Debian
- Configuration management tooling, particularly Chef
- Observability tooling, we use Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos, Karma, and ELK
- Telephony with SIP, FreeSWITCH, and Kamailio
- Other ownership areas include Kafka, Consul, MySQL
- Ability to successfully work and manage in a remote-first and asynchronous communication culture
- Ability to coordinate complex technical projects while providing high-level progress updates in clear, business-friendly terms
- Can reliably and quickly diagnose problems with people, process, and technology, find agreement, and drive to resolution
- Ability to ask good questions, get to decisions, stay curious, and promote psychological safety
- Display a strong sense of operational excellence, ownership for your services, and production uptime
- Ability to set high standards coupled with deep devotion for your team’s success
- Ability to promote a culture of understanding, learning, support, quality, and reliability
- 3+ years of experience directly managing SRE, DevOps, sysadmin, or other infrastructure teams
- Significant experience as a hiring manager
- Experience building, staffing, and maintaining high-performing engineering teams
What the job involves
- Reliability Engineering is Invoca's foundation. We provide the infrastructure, tools, and observability for Invoca to build whatever is needed. We ensure stability today and enable growth for tomorrow
- SRE is organized around two main areas:
- Consulting: Responsible for short-term, interrupt-driven requests and engagements with software development teams, helping develop longer term solutions to shift left and providing development teams with greater confidence and ownership of their infrastructure needs
- Core: Responsible for day-to-day service ownership and providing Invoca with a reliable and innovative foundation through expertise, ownership, and advancement of infrastructure
- Holistically, the SRE Group is responsible for production uptime and observability across dimensions of cost, performance, and analytics
- We support Invoca’s mission by providing realtime, highly-available infrastructure for call routing, audio processing, transcription, data storage, numerous APIs, and more
- Invoca is a B2B platform and our external customers rely on us to be a seamless part of their conversations with customers, provide timely insights and analytics, and do it all securely, at scale, across the US and EU
- Invoca takes a balanced approach to engineer on-call requirements and believes strongly in service ownership, allowing engineering teams to have autonomy and accountability for the amazing things they build
- This means engineering teams are on-call 24/7 for their service areas, including product development and SRE teams
- Leadership acts as an escalation point for their team and is expected to participate in the incident commander on-call rotation approximately two days per month
- The position’s reporting structure is: Director, SRE -> Director, Infrastructure & Security -> CTO -> CEO
- Help the team clarify and break down larger problems along with defining constraints to leverage their technical expertise when designing and implementing solutions
- Use metrics, data, and your team’s collective experience to drive development decisions and maximize value/ROI, reduce risk, and deliver with a high bar for quality
- Provide direct management to an SRE Tech Lead and a team of 8-10 direct reports across two teams
- Build capabilities in your engineers to meet the requirements and competencies of their role
- Organize the team around solving challenging problems presented by the team and the business
- Draft, evolve, and communicate process, strategy, vision, and goals
- Assist or own vendor management for infrastructure and platform tools
- Apply a build/borrow/buy framework to technology decisions
- Assist with compliance auditing activities for PCI, SOC, and ISO
- Set standards and policies for infrastructure usage across the engineering org
- Solicit feedback from internal customers on infrastructure challenges and opportunities
- Organize and facilitate work in 2-week sprints, initiatives, epics, and stories
- Own the post-incident work process for the team to improve following incidents in our service area
- Administrative work and facilitation for the team
- Participate in an incident commander on-call rotation approximately two days per month
- Recent work we’ve completed:
- A multi-version upgrade of MySQL including improvements in launch automation with minimal downtime, meeting compliance goals and providing new features for software development teams
- Launching the Invoca platform in the EU to meet long-term business goals and comply with data residency requirements for non-US customers
- Building out ArgoCD providing development teams with self-service changes to alerts in production, removing SRE as a rubber-stamper and reducing manual change requests
- Removing legacy infrastructure, including a deprecated product platform and legacy observability tooling
- Understand and reduce wasteful infrastructure spending as part of a larger organizational focus on COGS with a direct positive impact on our budget and wider improvements in the Engineering org
Our take
Invoca is an AI-powered call tracking and conversational analytics platform enabling marketing, sales, customer experience, and eCommerce teams to better understand and immediately act on information consumers share via conversations, revealing exactly which campaigns are performing and delivering high returns on investments.
The company is a market leader in AI-powered conversation intelligence, serving leading consumer brands in considered purchase industries like automotive, telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, and real estate. It has continued to add new new capabilities throughout the years since its 2008 founding, to further help brands drive more efficient marketing, faster revenue growth, and better experiences in an increasingly challenging economy.
Through funding raised from several investment organisations, including Silver Lake Waterman and Kingfisher Investment Advisors, the startup has now been branded a Unicorn and is in a prime spot for further growth. Its priority has been to invest in product innovation through both organic development and acquisitions. Also, its recent arrival on Google Cloud Marketplace marks a milestone in the company's growing collaboration with Google, allowing joint customers to power more effective media strategies even more easily as they strive for revenue growth.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
5% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jun 2022
$83m
SERIES F
Oct 2019
$56m
SERIES E
Total funding: $199.8m
Company benefits
- Paid Time Off - 20 days off for all full-time employees, plus 15 paid holidays, 10 days compassionate leave, 3 days volunteer time and more
- Medical, Dental and Vision Coverage
- Mental Well-being & Employee Assistance Program
- Paid Family/Medical Leave - up to six weeks 100% paid leave for baby bonding, adoption, and caring for family members, and up to twelve weeks 100% paid leave for one’s own medical leave
- Invacation (Sabbatical) - an additional week of PTO along with a bonus after seven years of service
- Wellness Subsidy - for gym membership, fitness classes, etc.
Company HQ
Santa Barbara Downtown, Santa Barbara, CA
Leadership
Colin Kelley
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously worked as the CTO at CallWave and as a Software Architect at Unisys / Pulsepoint.
Rob Duva
(Co-Founder)Co-Founder of Fin & Field. Previously worked at CallWave in multiple roles, including Senior Product Manager and the Director of Customer Acquisitions.
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