Director of Engineering – Quality & Reliability

Jobtailor; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Canoe is building a Site Reliability Engineering and Quality Engineering practice from the ground up. You will own end-to-end incident management, establish SLOs, error budgets, and production readiness, and lead the quality organization with an automation-first mindset.

Partners across architecture and engineering, driving metrics, governance, and tooling to improve reliability and client trust. This senior role reports to the VP of Application Development.

Qualifications

• Minimum 10 years of software engineering experience.
• At least 4 years leading quality, reliability, or platform engineering teams.
• Experience building SRE/quality practice from scratch.
• Ownership of incident management with retrospectives and follow-through.
• Deep background in quality strategy and distributed QA teams.
• Proven use of LLMs and agentic tools in real workflows.
• Fluency in quality metrics and executive-level reporting.
• Strong leadership and remote collaboration across time zones.
• Bachelor's degree in CS, Engineering, or related field.

Responsibilities

• Build Canoe's SRE practice from ground up, including SLOs and error budgets.
• Own incident management end-to-end with process and tooling.
• Lead Quality Engineering organization and internal leadership.
• Define risk-based quality strategy and CI/CD gates.
• Shift from manual verification to automation-first testing.
• Define and report executive KPIs on quality and reliability.
• Use quality data to influence engineering priorities.
• Serve as Technical Governance Owner for testing/incidents.
• Partner with architects on reliability and operability in decisions.
• Report to VP of Application Development as a peer.

Skills

SRE Leadership

Incident Management

Quality Engineering

Automation Testing

SLO Development

CI/CD Gates

LLMs & Agentic Tools

KPI Reporting

Distributed Team Leadership

Python

TypeScript

PHP/Laravel

Kafka

AWS

Terraform

PostgreSQL

Redis

ElasticSearch

Datadog

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

Python

TypeScript

PHP/Laravel

Kafka

AWS

Terraform

PostgreSQL

Redis

ElasticSearch

Datadog

Job description

• Build Canoe's Site Reliability Engineering practice from the ground up, including SLOs and error budgets on critical services, observability and alerting standards, production readiness reviews, and on-call design
• Own incident management across Canoe end to end, including process, tooling, escalation paths, retrospective quality, and follow-through on corrective actions
• Lead the Quality Engineering organization and build lasting in-house quality leadership and expertise
• Define a risk-based quality strategy, including quality gates in CI/CD pipelines
• Continue the shift from manual verification toward automation-first, AI-assisted testing, and specification-driven development
• Define and report executive-level KPIs for quality and reliability, such as escape rates, incident trends, and error-budget consumption
• Use quality and reliability KPIs to inform engineering priorities across teams
• Serve as Technical Governance Owner for testing and incident management topics
• Partner with architects to bring reliability, testability, and operability perspectives to technical decisions
• Report to the VP of Application Development as a peer of other engineering guild leads

Requirements

• Minimum of 10 years of software engineering experience
• At least 4 years leading quality, reliability, or platform engineering teams
• Experience building an SRE, reliability, or quality engineering practice from scratch
• Experience formally owning incident management for a company or major platform, from incident response through high-quality retrospectives and follow-through
• Deep quality engineering background, including ownership of quality strategy and experience leading distributed or offshore QA teams
• Demonstrated expertise applying LLMs and agentic tools such as Claude Code to real engineering workflows
• Fluency with quality and reliability metrics such as escape rate, flake rate, MTTD/MTTR, and SLO attainment, including experience reporting them at the executive level
• Excellent leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills with geographically distributed teams across multiple time zones
• Ability to work effectively with ambiguous or missing information and adapt quickly in a startup-like environment
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• Preferred: hands-on experience with Python, TypeScript, PHP/Laravel, Kafka, AWS, Terraform, PostgreSQL, Redis, ElasticSearch, or Datadog
• Preferred: fintech or other environments where data integrity and client trust are the product

Core Competencies

Demonstrates extensive experience in building and leading Site Reliability Engineering and Quality Engineering practices, with a strong focus on incident management, quality strategy, and automation-first testing methodologies. Proficient in defining and reporting quality and reliability metrics to inform engineering priorities and drive organizational excellence.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• Site Reliability Engineering Leadership
• Incident Management Ownership
• Quality Engineering Strategy Development
• Automation-First Testing Methodologies
• Quality and Reliability Metrics Reporting

Hard Skills

• Software Engineering
• Quality Engineering
• Incident Management
• Automation Testing
• SLO Development
• CI/CD Pipeline Quality Gates
• LLMs and Agentic Tools
• KPI Reporting
• Risk-Based Quality Strategy
• Distributed QA Team Leadership

Soft Skills

• Leadership
• Communication
• Interpersonal Skills
• Adaptability
• Problem-Solving

Industry Keywords

• Fintech
• Data Integrity
• Client Trust
• Quality Metrics
• Incident Trends

Tools & Technologies

• Python
• TypeScript
• PHP/Laravel
• Kafka
• AWS
• Terraform
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• ElasticSearch
• Datadog