Senior Director - Site Reliability Engineering - job 5 of 21

The Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering at our Foster City location oversees the performance, reliability, and automation of critical services. This includes leading the SRE team, creating policies, managing incident responses, and driving collaboration between development and operations.

Candidates should possess a strong background in Site Reliability Engineering, leadership experience, and expertise in scalability and system performance. Familiarity with DevSecOps principles and a track record of implementing successful CI/CD pipelines are also crucial for this position.

The Senior Director promotes an 'automation first' mindset by developing strategies that encourage the development team to automate processes and enhance system reliability. This includes mentoring team members and implementing best practices for monitoring and alerting.

The role offers a hybrid work environment, allowing flexibility to work remotely and from the office. Employees are encouraged to collaborate in-person for 2-3 days a week, making it ideal for those who thrive in both remote and on-site settings.

In this role, the Senior Director establishes Service Level Objectives and Error Budgets to quantify performance and reliability metrics. This ensures the team meets industry standards and continually improves service delivery.

When discussing your experience, focus on specific challenges you've faced, the size of the teams you've led, and how you set objectives that align with broader company goals. Always emphasize your leadership style and how you empower team members.

Explain your systematic approach to incident management, including how you gather data, analyze root causes, and implement preventative measures. Highlight the importance of collaboration and transparency in post-mortem processes.

Share specific projects or implementations where you successfully improved CI/CD pipelines. Discuss the tools you used and the impact these improvements had on reliability and deployment speeds.

Discuss your methods of integrating development and security practices. Share examples of initiatives you've led to promote collaboration and ensure that security is a priority from the design phase onward.

Provide insights on your experience with establishing SLAs that meet business needs. Discuss methodologies for monitoring performance against these objectives and how you engage teams to maintain accountability.

Highlight your commitment to continuous learning through training, workshops, and collaboration with other teams. Share examples of how this has led to improved practices within your team.

Detail a specific project, the challenges faced, your leadership approach, and the outcomes. This showcases your problem-solving capabilities and your ability to manage stress during high-stakes situations.

Discuss mentorship, training opportunities, and fostering an environment where team members can share knowledge and learn from one another. Provide examples of how this has led to professional development.

Highlight tools that have been effective in your past roles for monitoring, incident management, and automation. Explain why these tools are crucial for team success and service reliability.

Talk about your focus on redundancy, failover processes, and continuous monitoring. Include your strategies for testing system resilience through chaos engineering or other methodologies.