Senior Manager - Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Job Posting:

Since 1953, Ferguson has been a source of quality supplies for a variety of industries. Together We Build Better infrastructure, better homes and better businesses. We exist to make our customers’ complex projects simple, successful, and sustainable. We proactively solve problems, adapt and grow to continuously serve our customers, communities and each other. Ferguson, a Fortune 500 company, is proud to provide best-in-class products, service and capabilities across the following industries: Commercial/Mechanical, Facilities Supply, Fire and Fabrication, HVAC, Industrial, Residential Trade, Residential Building and Remodel, Waterworks and Residential Digital Commerce. Ferguson has approximately 36,000 associates across 1,700 locations. Ferguson is a community of proud associates who operate with the shared purpose of building something meaningful. You will build a career that you are proud of, at a company you can believe in.

Senior Manager - Site Reliability Engineering

Join Ferguson as a Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering and help shape the reliability, performance, and availability of our digital commerce platform. In this leadership role, you'll guide a team of Site Reliability Engineers responsible for the stability, automation, and observability of the Linux-based systems and infrastructure that power Ferguson's digital commerce, while driving the modernization of our SRE and DevOps practices. You'll partner closely with Backend Engineers, Frontend Engineers, Principal Solution Architects, Infrastructure Engineers, and Networking teams to deliver resilient platform capabilities, improve engineering standards, and pull digital commerce forward into more modern standard processes.

This is an opportunity for a proven, systems-thinking SRE leader who is passionate about developing high-performing teams, driving engineering excellence, and delivering meaningful business outcomes through reliability engineering and automation. The ideal candidate is technically strong enough to set strategic direction for the SRE domain - at least at the level of a Lead Site Reliability Engineer - while coaching senior and lead engineers to raise the reliability bar across the platform.

Location: Remote (Eastern or Central Time Zone) or Hybrid (Newport News, VA), in accordance with company policy. Applicants must be based within the Eastern or Central time zones.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Lead and develop a high-performing group of Site Reliability Engineers who coordinate the reliability, availability, and performance of Linux-based systems and infrastructure supporting digital commerce applications.
• Set technical and strategic vision for the SRE domain, driving adoption of Kubernetes-based container platforms, Docker workloads, and modern SRE/DevOps practices across teams.
• Establish and continuously improve CI/CD standards, driving improvements to pipelines built with GitHub Action Workflows and other modern tooling, including infrastructure-as-code practices using Terraform.
• Define configuration management and automation standards using Puppet and Python to reduce toil and eliminate repetitive manual work at scale.
• Guide strategy for load balancing, application delivery, and virtualized infrastructure using F5 and VMware, and for tuning web and application servers such as Nginx and Apache Tomcat.
• Champion observability using Datadog (logging, metrics, distributed traces, alerting) and sound artifact management practices using JFrog Artifactory so the team can detect and resolve issues early.
• Own incident management for the domain, defining incident response and on-call practices, leading root cause analysis for significant incidents, and converting findings into durable engineering improvements.
• Drive adoption of SRE/DevOps principles such as SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, balancing reliability, velocity, and technical debt across the platform.
• Champion a culture of accountability, collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning, and act as a technical escalation and decision point for sophisticated reliability and infrastructure challenges.
• Recruit, mentor, and retain top SRE talent while supporting career development, performance management, and succession planning, and coach lead and senior engineers to strengthen technical capability and leadership.
• Partner with Product Management, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, and Networking team members to align reliability strategy with platform and business priorities.

Qualifications and Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional experience administering Linux systems in a production environment, including 3+ years leading or managing engineering or SRE teams.
• Proven success setting technical direction for reliability, automation, or infrastructure initiatives at a scope comparable to or greater than a Lead Site Reliability Engineer.
• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker or similar container orchestration/containerization platforms.
• Good experience building, maintaining, and defining standards for CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or similar tooling, and solid experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Extensive experience with configuration management tools such as Puppet, along with extensive experience standardizing automation using Python or a similar language.
• Proven expertise in load balancing/application delivery and virtualization technologies, coupled with tuning web and application servers such as Nginx and Apache Tomcat.
• Good experience with observability tooling such as Datadog, including the ability to define observability standards, and with artifact repository tools such as JFrog Artifactory.
• Good understanding of networking, storage, and IT infrastructure fundamentals, including security concepts relevant to enterprise infrastructure.
• Experience defining incident response processes and on-call rotation structures, and championing SRE/DevOps principles such as SLIs/SLOs and error budgets across a team.
• Strong troubleshooting and systems-thinking skills with the ability to convert incident findings into durable engineering improvements.
• Experience working within Agile product delivery organizations and collaborating with Product Management, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, and Networking team members.
• Good communication, leadership, and team development skills, with a passion for mentoring engineers and building high-performing teams.

Leadership Skills:

• Strong leader who builds trust, accountability, and ownership across an SRE team.
• Demonstrable ability to lead engineering teams through modernization of SRE/DevOps practices and organizational change.
• Good communication skills coupled with the capacity to convey reliability and infrastructure concepts in terms of business value.
• Passion for mentoring engineers and developing future technical and reliability leaders.
• Ability to establish a culture focused on engineering excellence, operational reliability, continuous improvement, and customer outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority and collaborate across engineering, infrastructure, and networking organizations.
• Strong execution mentality with a focus on delivering measurable reliability and business results while continuously improving engineering quality.

At Ferguson, we care for each other. We value our well-being just as much as our hard work. We are committed to a holistic approach towards benefits plans and programs that support the mental, physical and financial well-being of our associates. Our competitive offering not only includes benefits like health, dental, vision, paid time off, life insurance and a 401(k) with a company match, but our associates also enjoy additional meaningful and inclusive enhancements that are adaptable to their diverse situations and needs, including mental health coverage, gender affirming and family building benefits, paid parental leave, associate discounts, community involvement opportunities and more!

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Pay Range:

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Actual pay rate may vary depending upon location. The estimated pay range for this position is below. The specific rate will depend on a candidate’s qualifications and prior experience.

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Estimated Ranges displayed are Monthly for Salaried roles OR Hourly for all other roles.

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This role is Bonus or Incentive Plan eligible.

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Ferguson complies with all wage regulations. The starting wage may be higher in certain locations based on local or state wage requirements.

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The Company is an equal opportunity employer as well as a government contractor that shall abide by the requirements of 41 CFR 60-300.5(a), which prohibits discrimination against qualified protected Veterans and the requirements of 41 CFR 60-741.5(A), which prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals on the basis of disability.

Ferguson Enterprises, LLC. is an equal employment employer F/M/Disability/Vet/SexualOrientation/GenderIdentity.

Equal Employment Opportunity and Reasonable Accommodation Information