Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Confluent Incident Management & Reliability

IBM; Toronto; On-site; CAD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM in Toronto, Ontario is seeking an experienced engineer for reliability improvement in multi-cloud environments. This role requires expertise in SRE, incident management, and strong skills in observability, scripting, and container orchestration.

The successful candidate will analyze failure patterns, drive organizational process changes, and maintain SLO/SLA standards while also acting as a coach for incident management practices. The position is ideal for a strategic thinker skilled in cloud technologies.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering.
• Experience navigating reliability programs in large organizations.
• Deep expertise in incident management tooling.

Responsibilities

• Analyze failure patterns and design reliability improvements.
• Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks.
• Develop training programs and coach teams through post-mortems.

Skills

Cloud experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure

Kubernetes and container orchestration

Observability: metrics, logging, tracing

Strong written communication

Experience driving org-wide process changes

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

Rootly

PagerDuty

Jira

Confluence

Slack

Job description

Your Role and Responsibilities

About the Role

Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When incidents happen in a multi‑cloud streaming platform, they happen at scale—data in motion, exactly‑once semantics, and cascading failure modes that require deep systems thinking. We need an expert‑level engineer who can drive proactive reliability improvements that prevent these incidents before they occur.

This role combines hands‑on technical work with strategic program ownership. You'll spend roughly 75% of your time on engineering: building automation, improving tooling, analyzing systemic failure patterns, and designing reliability improvements. The remaining 25% is teaching and coordination: coaching teams through post‑mortems, training incident commanders, and evolving our incident response practices.

You'll be part of a global team with follow‑the‑sun coverage, with clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability, a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering. You're the person who makes us need incident management less.

What You Will Do

• Analyze systemic failure patterns and design reliability improvements that prevent incident recurrence
• Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack
• Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments
• Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response across engineering
• Edit and review customer‑facing incident documents (CRCAs) to ensure quality and clarity
• Develop and deliver training programs; coach teams through post‑mortems
• Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices org‑wide
• Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing
• Kubernetes and container orchestration experience
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
• Strong written communication (design docs, runbooks, post‑mortems)
• Experience driving org‑wide process and cultural changes

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 10+ years of relevant experience in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering
• Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure (we run all three)
• Experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations
• Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, PagerDuty, or similar)
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale
• Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Advanced Cloud Knowledge: Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and its application in reliability and resiliency engineering.
• Specialized Scripting Skills: Proficiency in scripting languages and automation tools to optimize system reliability and performance.