Team Leader, Site Reliability Engineering

Remote; Iberia; Remote; PEN 412,000 - 618,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Work from anywhere

Flexible paid time off

Flexible working hours (async)

16 weeks paid parental leave

Budget for co-working spaces, learning

Mental health support services

Stock options

Home office budget & IT equipment

Job summary

Remote is seeking a Team Leader for the SRE/Platform Engineering team. This role combines leadership (40%) with hands-on reliability work (60%), owning career growth for reports and driving team direction across Kubernetes, AWS, and AI-enabled infrastructure.

You will guide incident response, SLOs, and observability practices while maintaining balance between operational load and project delivery in a fully remote, async environment.

Qualifications

• Hands-on background in site reliability, DevOps or cloud infrastructure engineering.
• Kubernetes in production, including operational realities.
• AWS at meaningful scale.
• Hands on AI building, enablement, scaling AI infrastructure.
• Strong observability practices and OpenTelemetry.
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• CI/CD systems such as GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• Docker and shell scripting.
• Experience running a reliability practice: incident response, on-call, SLOs and error budgets.
• Experience in regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Oversee career development of reports and steer team focus toward company goals.
• Act as team spokesperson across engineering and senior leadership.
• Define and own SRE goals, delivery priorities and risk tradeoffs.
• Manage on-call rotations and incident response processes.
• Maintain strong collaboration with Security and Platform teams.

Skills

People leadership

SRE mindset

Communication

Problem solving

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Terraform

CI/CD

Docker

OpenTelemetry

Linux

Job description

About Remote

Remote is building the infrastructure that makes global payroll and employment possible for everyone, everywhere. Our team is made up of people who want to own a piece of that work, not just contribute to it. That work happens across six continents, only Antarctica left to go, entirely remote. It also requires real fluency with AI in every role, not just familiarity with it. Our standards are high, and the ownership is total. You'll have the trust and space to find your own way to the best answer, and the support to see it through, because that's how we build things that actually work at this scale. In return, your career grows faster, because at Remote, growth is tied to results. We're founded on the principle that where someone lives should never limit what they can achieve, and we operate exactly that way.

What this role can offer you

Remote's SRE team exists so that our engineers can move quickly and our customers get a product that stays up. The team owns Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, CI infrastructure, our observability stack and the reliability practices that sits on top of all of it.

We are looking for a Team Leader to run that team. This is a 60% IC, 40% leadership role. You will own the career development of your reports, steer the teams focus using judgment against the company goals, and you will be the spokesperson for the team across engineering. You will also stay close enough to the technical work to set direction with credibility and to know when something is going wrong before it is escalated to you.

Reliability practice at Remote is maturing rather than mature. Our SLO framework is live on its first few teams and needs to reach the rest, there is real work to do on how we balance operational load against project delivery. If you want a team where the foundations are in place and the interesting problems are still open, this is that team.

What you bring

People leadership

• You have led an SRE, infrastructure or platform engineering team, and you have owned your reports' growth, performance and career progression rather than just their sprints.
• You coach both craft and the soft skills, you can point to people who grew because of it.
• You handle underperformance directly and early, with clarity and empathy.
• You have hired engineers, and you can tell the difference between a good interview and a good engineer.
• You read team dynamics well and you resolve conflict rather than routing around it.
• You have a natural talent fostering commitment to the goals of the company.

Technical depth

• A hands‑on background in site reliability, DevOps or cloud infrastructure engineering, deep enough that you can review your team's work, challenge a design and be taken seriously in an incident.
• Kubernetes in production, including the operational reality of it rather than the happy path.
• AWS at meaningful scale.
• Hands on AI building, enablement, scaling AI infrastructure.
• Solid o11y practices and principles,
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• CI/CD systems such as GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• Docker and shell scripting.
• You have run a reliability practice: incident response, on‑call, SLOs and error budgets, and the discipline of turning incidents into changes that stick.
• Understanding and history of working in regulated environments.

Ways of working

• You prioritise exceptionally well when operational load and project work compete, and you protect your team's focus without dropping the operational commitment.
• You write clearly. Remote is fully distributed and async, so most of your leadership will happen in writing.
• You build relationships across teams. A lot of SRE's value comes from being the team others bring problems to early.

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of a backend language, ideally Elixir, or otherwise Java, Clojure, Node.js, Python or similar.
• Depth in modern observability: OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and tools such as Honeycomb.
• Database operations experience, particularly PostgreSQL or Aurora performance, connection pool health and query tuning.
• Running and configuring Linux systems outside a cloud environment.
• Security capability from both a defensive and an offensive standpoint.
• Cloud cost management and FinOps.
• Experience growing a team from a small base, including building the hiring bar as you go.

Key Responsibilities

Your people

• The full career lifecycle of your reports: onboarding, feedback, performance assessment, progression and hiring.
• Team health, dynamics and the retrospective habit that keeps them honest.
• Being the team's spokesperson to the rest of engineering and to senior leadership.

Delivery

• The SRE goals: what the team commits to, in what order, and why.
• The support rotation and on-call model.

The platform

• Remote's core infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, DNS and TLS, CI infrastructure.
• The reliability practice: SLOs, error budgets, incident response and the observability stack.
• The partnership with our Security team on threats, patching and infrastructure controls, including our audit and compliance obligations.
• The vendor relationships that sit behind the platform, including renewals and commercial conversations with support from your Director.

Practicals

• You will report to: Director of Engineering, Platform
• Team: Site Reliability Engineering, part of Platform Engineering
• Direct reports: 5
• Location: Anywhere in the world. Our current coverage is strongest in EMEA and APAC, so candidates who overlap with either, or who can help us close the Americas gap, are especially welcome.
• Start date: As soon as possible.

Benefits

• work from anywhere
• flexible paid time off
• flexible working hours (we are async)
• 16 weeks paid parental leave
• budget towards co-working spaces, learning and wellness (including gym memberships)
• mental health support services
• stock options
• home office budget & IT equipment

How you’ll plan your day (and life)

We work async at Remote which means you can plan your schedule around your life (and not around meetings). Read more at remote.com/async. You will be empowered to take ownership and be proactive. When in doubt you will default to action instead of waiting. Your life‑work balance is important and you will be encouraged to put yourself and your family first, and fit work around your needs.

Not only do we encourage folks from all ethnic groups, genders, sexuality, age, abilities, disability status and any other under‑represented group to apply, but we prioritize a sense of belonging. We have 4 ERGs (Women, Disability, Queer, Minorities in Tech) who meet regularly with the People team. During your interviews and beyond, we ask & encourage anybody who needs an accommodation to request one from their recruiter. We will ask you to voluntarily tell us your pronouns at interview stage, and you will have the option to answer our anonymous demographic questionnaire when you apply below. As an equal employment opportunity employer it’s important to us that our workforce reflects people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences and this data will help us to stay accountable. We thank you for providing this data, if you chose to. At Remote, we embrace AI as a valuable tool while prioritizing human creativity and authenticity. We look forward to meeting candidates who balance innovation with genuine expertise and experience. To learn more about Remote's AI guidelines check see here. Please note we accept applications on an ongoing basis.