Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering

Job description

Position overview ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering to build and lead a world-class SRE organization across our observability and control plane product portfolios. You will architect reliability programs that span internal platforms and commercial products, establishing SRE culture, practices, and tooling from the ground up. This is a program-building role. You will define SRE strategy, set operational standards, build teams (starting from scratch or scaling existing pockets), and drive measurable people and organizational transformation.

You will report to the VP of Engineering and partner with product, platform, and infrastructure leaders across multiple business units.

Key responsibilities Program building & strategy

• Build an SRE program from the ground up—define charter, operating model, hiring strategy, and multi-year roadmap Establish SRE principles, practices, and standards across observability products (OODP, metrics, alerting) and control plane offerings
• Create unified reliability frameworks that work for both internal-facing and customer-facing systems Design SRE on-call rotations, incident response processes, and blameless postmortem culture Team leadership & people transformation
• Build and scale an SRE team from existing base across observability and control plane domains
• Design hiring criteria and interview processes that attract high-caliber SREs with platform and reliability expertise
• Create mentorship and career development paths; foster SRE culture and continuous learning
• Drive organizational transformation: shift product and infrastructure teams toward reliability-first mindsets
• Establish clear SRE career levels, expectations, and growth frameworks Reliability & operational excellence Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for observability and control plane products; operationalize them Build AI native toil reduction initiatives; automate repetitive operational work across SRE and product teams
• Own incident management: design escalation policies, postmortem practices, and continuous improvement loops
• Partner with platform/infrastructure teams to improve reliability infrastructure (CI/CD, deployment systems, monitoring)
• Establish reliability metrics, dashboards, and reporting for leadership visibility Cross-functional alignment
• Partner with product teams to embed SRE thinking in design and development of new features
• Work with observability leadership on internal vs. commercial product strategy—tailor SRE programs accordingly
• Collaborate with customer success and support on customer-facing reliability; define SLA/SLO communication
• Partner with infrastructure and platform teams on shared services, runbooks, and operational tooling
• Engage with security and compliance on reliability-related governance and risk

Qualifications

Required qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or reliability engineering at scale
• 5+ years in leadership roles (director or principal engineer) managing SRE or reliability teams of 10+ engineers
• Demonstrated track record building SRE programs from scratch or scaling immature programs—with measurable business impact
• Strong evidence of driving people and organizational transformation; ability to shift culture from reactive to proactive reliability Deep expertise in SRE practices: SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems, on-call design, toil reduction Hands-on experience with observability platforms (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) Experience operating both internal platforms and commercial products (SaaS) Comfort with the messy reality of multi-team, multi-product environments—ability to establish standards and drive adoption Preferred qualifications Experience with control plane architectures or platform-as-a-service systems Background building SRE programs in hybrid or multi-cloud deployments
• Track record of mentoring and developing other SRE/platform leaders
• Familiarity with chaos engineering, reliability testing, or resilience frameworks Open-source contribution or thought leadership in SRE community Core competencies Program building
• Ability to define a charter, secure stakeholder buy-in, and execute a multi-year strategy from concept to maturity Comfortable with ambiguity and building in greenfield environments People transformation
• Proven ability to shift organizational mindsets—making reliability a shared responsibility, not just an SRE function
• Strong coaching and mentorship instincts; creates environments where people grow
• Excellent communication skills—able to articulate reliability concepts to engineers, product managers, and executives Technical depth Hands-on SRE expertise; can code, debug, and architect solutions alongside the team Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, and telemetry infrastructure
• Familiarity with multiple deployment models, cloud platforms, and operational challenges Operational leadership Data-driven decision making; comfortable with SLOs, metrics, and evidence-based practices Cross-functional influencing; ability to drive change without direct authority Bias toward action and iteration—comfort making decisions with incomplete information What we offer Competitive salary and equity package Comprehensive health, wellness, and retirement benefits Unlimited PTO and flexible work arrangements Leadership coaching and executive development The opportunity to build a world-class SRE organization and shape reliability culture across critical product lines JV20