Principal Customer Reliability Engineer

Accela

Principal Customer Reliability Engineer at Accela serving as a technical liaison for SaaS operations. Facilitating customer engagements and ensuring reliable outcomes in complex environments.

Posted 6/23/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $160,000 - $190,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AzureCloudKubernetesPythonTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Serve as the customer-facing technical representative for Accela's SaaS Operations organization, partnering with Engineering, SRE, Database Engineering, Product, Professional Services, and Support teams to ensure customer success.
Lead technical engagements related to SaaS implementations, migrations, and ongoing production operations, ensuring reliable and predictable outcomes for customers.
Partner with Professional Services and Support teams to identify technical requirements, define migration strategies, and facilitate successful transitions into steady-state operations.
Develop and improve operational processes, tooling, monitoring, metrics, and alerting capabilities that support customer onboarding, migrations, and ongoing platform reliability.
Act as a senior escalation point for complex customer issues, leveraging observability tools, application performance monitoring, log analysis, distributed tracing, and metrics to diagnose and resolve production concerns.
Lead cross-functional response efforts for critical customer-impacting incidents and implementation challenges, coordinating stakeholders to drive timely resolution.
Partner with customers to establish reliability expectations, communicate service-level commitments, and provide guidance regarding operational risk and change management practices.
Collaborate with Sales, Professional Services, and Support teams to communicate Accela's service management processes, cloud operations practices, and compliance posture, including SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and PCI-DSS requirements.
Provide customer-driven insights and feedback to Product, Engineering, and SRE teams to improve platform reliability, usability, and operational effectiveness.
Support pre-sales and customer expansion activities by providing technical expertise related to reliability, architecture, cloud operations, and compliance.
Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and best-practice guidance to Customer Reliability Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, and other technical teams.

Requirements

What you’ll need

8+ years of experience in Production Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Operations, Technical Support Engineering, or related SaaS environments, including customer-facing or escalation leadership responsibilities.
Strong customer focus and demonstrated ability to communicate effectively with both technical and business stakeholders.
Hands-on experience operating and supporting SaaS platforms on Microsoft Azure.
Experience with Kubernetes and modern containerized environments.
Strong experience using observability and monitoring tools, including APM platforms, distributed tracing, logging, and metrics solutions.
Deep troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis expertise across application, infrastructure, networking, operating system, and database layers.
Working knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code concepts and tools, particularly Terraform.
Experience developing automation and operational tooling using Python, PowerShell, Bash, or similar scripting languages.
Demonstrated ability to lead Incident, Problem, and Change Management processes during high-severity customer escalations.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting technical information to customer leadership and executive stakeholders.
Experience using Git and GitHub-based workflows.

Benefits

Comp & perks

flexible time off
comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
family planning benefits
401(k) retirement savings plan with company match
health savings account with company contributions
flexible spending account
life, accident, and disability coverage
business travel insurance
employee assistance programs
other well-being benefits

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

Production EngineeringSite Reliability EngineeringCloud OperationsTechnical Support EngineeringSaaS platformsKubernetesobservability toolsRoot Cause AnalysisInfrastructure-as-Codeautomation scripting

Soft Skills

customer focuseffective communicationtechnical leadershipmentorshipproblem-solvingincident managementchange managementcollaborationstakeholder coordinationpresentation skills

Certifications

SOC 2HIPAAFedRAMPStateRAMPPCI-DSS