SRE Leader

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

Infrastructure, built properly:

• Build infrastructure as code for all of FanOS using Terraform on AWS. Write the core modules and establish patterns for others to follow.
• Own AWS account structure, access controls, secrets management, and emergency (“break-glass”) access.
• Track cloud costs per tenant and overall hosting margin.

CI/CD and change management:

• Build deployment pipelines for every FanOS service. Design reusable pipeline templates and implement the complex components.
• Enable safe releases across tenants through staged rollouts, feature flags, automatic rollbacks, and release gates for testing, code quality, and security.
• Establish a change process that helps engineers ship quickly while keeping production stable.
• Track delivery health, including deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore.

Observability:

• Provide a unified view of platform health through metrics, logs, and traces across all services.
• Enable per-tenant visibility into which customers are affected, how severely, and why.
• Tune alerts to reflect customer impact, so on-call engineers are paged for real issues, not noise.
• Build dashboards that show leadership availability and performance against targets.

Reliability and incident management:

• Define service- and tenant-level availability targets (SLOs), supported by observability.
• Establish on-call rotations, severity levels, incident command, and post-incident reviews.
• Serve as incident commander during major outages until the team is ready to take on that responsibility.

Business continuity and disaster recovery:

• Design backup, restore, and failover processes, with recovery targets agreed upon with the business.
• Run regular disaster-recovery tests to prove recovery works.

Requirements:

• Built from scratch: Established incident management, on-call, SLOs, or disaster recovery where none existed. Merely operating a process designed by someone else does not qualify.
• Hands-on today: Wrote production infrastructure code within the past 12 months and can explain their Terraform modules and state design.
• Built CI/CD pipelines: Designed deployment pipelines used by multiple teams, including rollback mechanisms and release gates.
• Built observability: Set up production metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting, and can explain how they measure customer experience, not just server CPU and memory.
• Real incident command: Led the response to a major customer-facing outage and ran the post-incident review.
• Customer-facing SaaS experience: Operated production systems for external customers with uptime commitments. Internal tools or batch platforms alone do not qualify.
• AWS in production: AWS was their primary production cloud.
• Small-team coach: Grew or coached 2-5 engineers. Managing a 30-person organization through multiple layers is a different role.
• Clear communicator: Answers questions concisely, in under two minutes, and then stops.

Strong signals:

• Multi-tenant SaaS operations, including handling noisy neighbors, per-tenant costs, and tenant-level failure isolation.
• Ran a real disaster-recovery test or regional failover.
• Reduced cloud costs and can provide before-and-after figures.
• Experience in media, live events, gaming, or high-traffic consumer applications with spikes around live events.

Where to find candidates:

• B2B or consumer SaaS companies of roughly 100-1,000 employees, particularly Series B-D companies where the candidate was among the first infrastructure or SRE hires.
• Relevant titles include SRE Lead, Platform Engineering Lead, Staff or Principal SRE, DevOps Lead, and Infrastructure Engineering Manager at a startup.
• Live-traffic businesses such as OTT, gaming, fantasy sports, ticketing, and fintech payments.

Where not to look:

• Large enterprises or global captive centers where central teams manage incidents, change approvals, and account setup.
• IT services firms and managed service providers.
• Corporate IT, infrastructure, or compliance leadership roles.

Clear resume or screening rejection signs:

• Career focused mainly on corporate IT, such as end-user support, VMware, data centers, SAP, or office networks.
• Cloud experience appears only as a recent add-on.
• Career focused mainly on security compliance, audits, or GRC (ISO, SOC 2, ITGC, access reviews) without infrastructure building.
• Career focused mainly on IT services or managed services, operating infrastructure for clients' platforms rather than the candidate's own product.
• No production AWS experience (Azure-only, GCP-only, or on-premises only).
• Has managed 15 or more people through multiple layers and has not written infrastructure code in more than two years.
• Has had three or more jobs lasting less than 18 months in the past eight years.

Skills

AWS, DevOps, Platform, SRE, Terraform