Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Vertafore; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 175,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical plans

Vision plans

Dental plans

Life & AD&D

401(k) match

Parental leave

EFAP

Tuition assistance

Job summary

Vertafore, a leader in insurance technology, seeks a Director of Site Reliability Engineering to drive reliability, performance, and observability for a portfolio of products. You will own SLIs/SLOs, incident response, automation, and CI/CD practices, guiding multiple teams and collaborating with Product Development, Cloud Ops, and Security to ensure operational excellence.

This role bridges development and operations with a software engineering mindset across the service lifecycle.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in Software Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or reliability roles.
• 8+ years in leadership.
• Proven ability to leverage software engineering principles and practices to solve reliability and operational challenges.
• Expertise in CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Strong AWS knowledge and experience with container orchestration.
• Proven ability to lead reliability programs across multiple SaaS products.
• Experience architecting applications or infrastructure for high-growth cloud platforms.
• Experience in B2B SaaS environments involving large-scale distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Product Reliability Leadership
• Define and enforce SLIs/SLOs for a subset of Vertafore flagship products.
• Drive observability strategy across application and infrastructure layers.
• Release Engineering & Toil Reduction: Oversee CI/CD pipelines for product deployments using tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, Ansible, and LaunchDarkly.
• Monitor and cap Toil at 50% using automation and AI tools; focus remaining time on scalable project work.
• Incident Management: define and participate in 24x7 on-call rotations; ensure rapid resolution and blameless postmortems.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: partner with Cloud Ops on capacity planning, OS patching, and load balancing.
• Team Leadership: manage a group of Managers and Engineers, mentoring teams on automation, observability, and reliability best practices.

Skills

SRE Leadership

AWS

CI/CD

Observability

Incident Response

Container Orchestration

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field

Tools

GitLab

Jenkins

Ansible

LaunchDarkly

Job description

$175,000 - $220,000 / year + Bonus

The insurance industry runs on Vertafore. We equip agencies, MGAs, and carriers with the core digital systems, specialized AI, and data-driven foundation to eliminate distribution drag across the insurance lifecycle, spanning sales, servicing, and back-office operations. Underpinned by unmatched speed and performance power, we are the trusted backbone that’s taking the insurance industry from friction to flow with Distribution Velocity - speed, performance, and trust - to drive growth at scale. With over 95% of the top agencies and insurers and 50% of industry compliance transactions running through Vertafore, we lead at the intersection of innovation and trust, giving insurance professionals the confidence to transform and win in the AI era. Our reach is global, with headquarters in Denver, Colorado, and offices across the U.S., Canada, and India.

The Director, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) will lead reliability, performance, and observability initiatives for a portfolio of Vertafore products. This role owns SLIs/SLOs, incident response, automation, and CI/CD practices for assigned product families. Directors will manage multiple teams and collaborate with Product Development, Architecture, Cloud Operations, Information Security, and other SRE leaders to ensure operational excellence. This role is responsible for bridging the gap between development and operations by applying a software engineering mindset to system administration. You will own the lifecycle of services - from inception and design, through deployment, operation, and refinement.

Key Responsibilities

• Product Reliability Leadership
• Define and enforce SLIs/SLOs for a subset of Vertafore flagship products.
• Drive observability strategy across application and infrastructure layers.
• Release Engineering & Toil Reduction
  • Oversee CI/CD pipelines for product deployments using tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, Ansible, and LaunchDarkly.
  • Monitor and cap "Toil" (manual, repetitive operational work) at 50% using automation and AI tools, ensuring the team spends the remaining time on project work that scales the system.
  • Manage "Error Budgets" to balance the velocity of feature releases with the stability of the platform, ensuring clear consequences when budgets are exhausted.
• Incident Management
  • Define and participate in 24x7 on-call rotations for assigned products; ensure rapid resolution and blameless postmortems.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
  • Partner with Cloud Ops on capacity planning, OS patching (app tier), and load balancing (ALB, F5).
  • Align reliability goals with product roadmaps and customer SLAs.
• Team Leadership
  • Manage a group of Managers and Engineers, mentoring teams on automation, observability, and reliability best practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.
• 15+ years in Software Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or reliability roles; 8+ years in leadership.
• Proven ability to leverage software engineering principles and practices to solve reliability and operational challenges.
• Expertise in CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Strong AWS knowledge and experience with container orchestration.
• Proven ability to lead reliability programs across multiple SaaS products.
• Experience architecting applications or infrastructure for high-growth cloud platforms.
• Experience in B2B SaaS environments involving large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven leadership communicating and influencing at team, peer, and leadership levels.
• Demonstrated experience driving operational excellence through metrics and KPIs.
• (Preferred) Background supporting financial services, healthcare, or regulated industries.

Benefits

*Canada Only

• The opportunity to work in a space where modern technology meets a stable and vital industry
• Medical, vision & dental plans
• Life, AD&D
• Short Term and Long Term Disability
• Pension Plan & Employer Match
• Maternity, Paternity and Parental Leave
• Employee and Family Assistance Program (EFAP)
• Education Assistance
• Additional programs - Employee Referral and Internal Recognition

*US Only

• The opportunity to work in a space where modern technology meets a stable and vital industry
• Medical, vision & dental plans
  • PPO & high-deductible options
• Health Savings Account & Flexible Spending Accounts options:
  • Health Care FSA
  • Dental & Vision FSA
  • Dependent Care FSA
  • Commuter FSA
• Life, AD&D (Basic & Supplemental), and Disability
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan & Employer Match
• Supplemental Plans - Pet insurance, Hospital Indemnity, and Accident Insurance
• Parental Leave & Adoption Assistance
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Education & Legal Assistance
• Additional programs - Tuition Reimbursement, Employee Referral, Internal Recognition, and Wellness
• Commuter Benefits (Denver)

Vertafore is a drug free workplace and conducts preemployment drug and background screenings.

The selected candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the job responsibilities, duties, skill, or working conditions. In addition, this document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an "at will" relationship.

Vertafore strongly supports equal employment opportunity for all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law.

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