Senior Manager, SRE

Backblaze

full-time

Posted on: 9/25/2025

Origin: • 🇺🇸 United States

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💰 $175,000 - $215,000 per year

Senior

AnsibleAWSAzureCloudDistributed SystemsDockerGoGoogle Cloud PlatformGrafanaKubernetesLinuxMicroservicesPrometheusPythonTerraform

About the role

Build, lead, and mentor a team of SREs across multiple regions and time zones.
Define the long-term vision and roadmap for SRE, aligning with organizational objectives.
Partner with product and engineering to ensure reliability is embedded in design, development, and operations.
Own the end-to-end reliability of critical customer-facing services.
Establish and maintain SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to measure and enforce service quality.
Drive root cause analysis and problem management for major incidents, ensuring long-term fixes are prioritized.
Champion adoption of ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).
Expand automation in deployment, monitoring, testing, and incident response to reduce toil.
Oversee observability platforms (e.g., Catchpoint, Grafana, Moogsoft/BigPanda, Prometheus, Datadog).
Ensure robust configuration, capacity, and change management practices.
Partner with Network Engineering, DevOps, NOC, and Product Engineering on scalable, resilient architecture.
Support business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance requirements.
Engage with vendors and service providers to manage SLAs and performance outcomes.
Hire, coach, and develop engineers and managers, creating strong career paths within SRE.
Foster a culture of reliability, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Lead succession planning and leadership pipeline development.

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred).
10+ years in infrastructure, reliability, or operations engineering roles.
5+ years in people leadership with experience managing managers and global teams.
Deep expertise in Linux operating systems (administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting, security hardening).
Strong knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, private cloud), and networking fundamentals.
Solid background in observability, monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks.
Proficiency with automation (Python, Go, Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines).
Familiarity with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices architectures.
Strong understanding of ITIL/OSS frameworks, SLO/error budget practices, and incident management at scale.
Proven ability to manage large-scale, high-availability environments.
Strong communication skills with executive presence; able to translate technical topics into business outcomes.
Demonstrated success in building and maturing high-performing SRE/operations teams.
Preferred: Experience in a service provider, CDN, or large-scale SaaS environment.
Preferred: Familiarity with compliance and regulatory frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR).
Preferred: Track record of driving cultural transformation toward reliability-first principles.