Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Aiven; Helsinki; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Participate in equity plan

Hybrid work policy

Professional Development Plan budget

Employee Assistance Program

Job summary

Aiven is searching for a Director of Site Reliability Engineering in Helsinki, Finland. This leadership position involves guiding a global SRE team to ensure reliability and operational excellence of the Aiven platform. Responsibilities include defining the SRE strategy, managing incidents, and mentoring technical leaders. Successful candidates will possess extensive experience in SRE practices and a solid technical foundation in distributed systems. The role also offers a hybrid work model and various global benefits.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading and scaling global SRE or infrastructure organizations.
• Strong track record of defining and executing reliability strategy at scale.
• Ability to build, develop, and mentor senior leaders.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive global SRE operating strategy.
• Build and lead a multi-regional SRE organization through managers.
• Own global incident management strategy and operating model.

Skills

Leadership in global SRE organizations

Defining reliability strategies

Building high-performing teams

Incident management frameworks

Data-driven leadership

Technical foundation in distributed systems

Job description

We’re a global team of over 400 people, working together to push the boundaries of open-source technology and multi-cloud solutions. Our vision is to help developers, builders, and creators bring their ideas to life with speed and simplicity, by providing a cloud data platform that makes open-source databases, search, streaming, and application infrastructure easily accessible to everyone.

The Role:

We are seeking a Director of Site Reliability Engineering to lead a global organization responsible for the reliability and operational excellence of the Aiven platform globally. You will lead a high-performing SRE team, setting the vision and strategy to ensure resilient, scalable, and highly automated systems across our 24/7/365 operations.

Your team will proactively manage platform health, lead incident response and cross-functional coordination, and drive continuous improvement in reliability and performance. As a senior leader, you will partner closely with engineering, product, and support teams worldwide, influence system architecture, and invest in tooling and automation to reduce toil and enhance production reliability.

This role combines strategic leadership, customer centricity, and deep operational accountability, with a focus on delivering reliable services at global scale while developing strong technical leaders within your organization.

What You'll Do:

• Define and drive global SRE operating strategy in partnership with regional SRE leaders across EMEA, AMER and APAC, ensuring alignment on reliability goals, operating models, and execution across a 24/7/365 follow-the-sun organization.
• Build and lead a multi-regional SRE organization through managers, developing leadership capability, mentoring team, and ensuring consistent performance, culture, and delivery across geographies.
• Set the vision and roadmap for reliability engineering, enabling teams to deliver high-impact tools, automation, and process initiatives that improve platform resilience, scalability, and efficiency.
• Own global incident management strategy and operating model, including on-call design, coverage, and escalation frameworks, ensuring seamless coordination and high availability across regions.
• Establish a metrics-driven operating cadence, defining KPIs/SLIs/SLOs/Error Budget, driving data-informed prioritization, and embedding operational rigor and continuous improvement across the SRE organization.

What We're Looking For:

• Proven experience leading and scaling global SRE or infrastructure organizations through managers, ideally across multiple regions and time zones.
• Strong track record of defining and executing reliability strategy at scale, including ownership of SLIs/SLOs, incident management frameworks, and operational excellence programs.
• Demonstrated ability to build, develop, and mentor senior leaders, creating high-performing, inclusive teams and strong leadership pipelines.
• Experience operating in a 24/7/365 production environment, with deep understanding of follow-the-sun models, on-call design, and large-scale incident response.
• Ability to partner cross-functionally at the executive level (Engineering, Product, Support) to influence architecture, prioritization, and long-term platform investments.
• Strong data-driven leadership approach, with experience defining SLI/SLOs and using metrics to drive prioritization, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Solid technical foundation in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and automation, with the ability to engage credibly with senior engineers and influence technical direction.
• Experience driving large-scale change and organizational design, including scaling teams, evolving operating models, and improving efficiency and reliability at company level.

Amazing! What's next:

If you think Aiven is the place for you and that our Values align with yours, send us your resume and we’ll get in touch!

Global Benefits:

Our global benefits are designed to help you thrive and grow, personally and professionally:

• Participate in Aiven’s equity plan.
• Balance work and life with our hybrid work policy.
• Choose the equipment you need to set yourself up for success.
• Use your Professional Development Plan budget for learning opportunities.
• Receive holistic wellbeing support through our global Employee Assistance Program.
• Inquire about our Global Time Off Commitment (Parental and Sick Leave, as well as Personal Time)
• Enjoy country-specific benefits for our global cast.

How to Recognize and Avoid Employment Scams:

There has been a rise in fake job postings used by scammers to get personal information. At Aiven, all of our emails relating to recruitment come from an @aiven.io, @greenhouse.io or @eu.greenhouse.io domain and all of our interviews are conducted by video call or in person. Our interviews will never occur via text or chat. If you’re unsure of the legitimacy of a job opportunity/offer pertaining to Aiven, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [e-mail].

Equal Opportunities:

Aiven provides equal employment opportunities to all qualified employees and applicants for employment without regard to age, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, marital and family status or without regard to any other similar personal attributes. Aiven complies with applicable local laws governing non-discrimination in employment in every location in which the company operates. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, training and any other terms and conditions related to employment.

At Aiven we are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities or special needs in our working environment and job application procedures. We make all reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities or who otherwise need support to thrive in the workplace. We are committed to continuously improving workplace accessibility. There is an option to request a discussion in the application process but if you have any questions before applying please write to us at [e-mail].