Director, Site Reliability Engineering & Capacity Management

First Citizens; Raleigh (NC); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

First Citizens Bank seeks a Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) & Capacity Management in Raleigh, NC to lead the reliability, performance, and capacity strategy for our critical technology platforms.

You will drive observability, incident management, automation, and capacity forecasting, partnering with Application Development, Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, and Operations to keep services highly available and compliant.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology or related field plus 8+ years in IT including development, support, and management.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in Technology Operations, SRE, Infrastructure, capacity management, or related disciplines.
• 5+ years of leadership experience managing managers, engineers, or high-performing technical teams.
• Experience leading enterprise reliability and operational excellence programs.
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident management practices.
• Deep knowledge of cloud technologies, distributed systems, application performance monitoring, and enterprise operations.
• Experience establishing and reporting on operational metrics, KPIs, and executive dashboards.
• Proven ability to lead large-scale technology transformations and drive organizational change.
• Strong communication and executive presentation skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop teams responsible for Site Reliability Engineering and Capacity Management.
• Define and execute the enterprise strategy for reliability, observability, performance management, and capacity planning.
• Establish reliability, availability, performance and capacity management objectives aligned to organizational goals.
• Build and maintain operational standards, governance processes, and best practices across technology operations.
• Develop a culture focused on automation, continuous improvement, accountability, and operational excellence.
• Partner with senior technology leaders to drive modernization and resiliency initiatives.
• Oversee enterprise monitoring, observability, event management, and alerting capabilities.
• Establish and monitor SLOs, SLIs, and reliability metrics.
• Lead incident management, major incident response, post-incident reviews, and root cause analysis programs.
• Drive reduction of production incidents through proactive monitoring, automation, and reliability engineering practices.
• Champion implementation and adoption of observability platforms and monitoring standards.
• Improve MTTR/MTTD through process improvements and automation.
• Lead enterprise capacity planning across infrastructure, cloud, and mainframe environments.
• Develop forecasting models and long-range capacity strategies.
• Establish baselines, utilization targets, trend analysis, and capacity reporting.

Skills

Leadership

Observability

Incident management

Cloud technologies

SRE

Automation

Executive communication

Education

Bachelor's Degree

High School Diploma or GED

Tools

Dynatrace

Splunk

SolarWinds

Databahn

BMC Helix

Job description

Overview

The Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) & Capacity Management is a senior technology leadership role responsible for overseeing the reliability, performance, scalability, and capacity strategy of the organization's critical technology platforms. This leader will drive operational excellence across the SRE and Capacity Management teams, ensuring systems remain highly available, resilient, and capable of supporting current and future business demands.

The Director will establish and execute a strategic vision for observability, reliability engineering, incident management, performance optimization, capacity forecasting, and automation while partnering closely with Application Development, Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, and Operations teams.

This role is accountable for improving service reliability, reducing operational risk, increasing automation, and ensuring technology investments align with business growth and regulatory expectations.

Responsibilities & Qualifications

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Strategy

• Lead and develop teams responsible for Site Reliability Engineering and Capacity Management.
• Define and execute the enterprise strategy for reliability, observability, performance management, and capacity planning.
• Establish key reliability, availability, performance, and capacity management objectives aligned to organizational goals.
• Build and maintain operational standards, governance processes, and best practices across technology operations.
• Develop a culture focused on automation, continuous improvement, accountability, and operational excellence.
• Partner with senior technology leaders to drive modernization and resiliency initiatives.

Site Reliability Engineering

• Oversee enterprise monitoring, observability, event management, and alerting capabilities.
• Establish and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and reliability metrics.
• Lead incident management, major incident response, post-incident reviews, and root cause analysis programs.
• Drive reduction of production incidents through proactive monitoring, automation, and reliability engineering practices.
• Champion implementation and adoption of observability platforms and monitoring standards across the enterprise.
• Improve Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) through process improvements and automation.

Capacity Management

• Lead enterprise capacity planning processes across infrastructure, applications, cloud, and mainframe environments.
• Develop forecasting models and long-range capacity strategies supporting business growth and technology transformation initiatives.
• Establish performance baselines, utilization targets, trend analysis, and capacity reporting.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Architecture, and Finance teams to optimize technology investments and resource utilization.
• Ensure capacity risks are identified and addressed before impacting service delivery.

Operational Excellence

• Drive automation initiatives that reduce manual effort and improve operational efficiency.
• Develop and maintain operational dashboards, KPIs, and executive reporting.
• Manage vendor relationships and strategic technology partnerships.
• Support regulatory, audit, risk, and compliance activities related to technology operations and resiliency.
• Establish workforce planning and succession strategies for critical operational functions.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree and 8 years of experience in Information Technology including application development, support roles, and management. OR High School Diploma or GED and 12 years of experience in Information Technology including application development, support roles, and management.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in Technology Operations, Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Operations, Capacity Management, Enterprise Monitoring, or related disciplines.
• 5+ years of leadership experience managing managers, engineers, or high-performing technical teams.
• Experience leading enterprise reliability and operational excellence programs.
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident management practices.
• Deep knowledge of cloud technologies, distributed systems, application performance monitoring, and enterprise operations.
• Experience establishing and reporting on operational metrics, KPIs, and executive dashboards.
• Proven ability to lead large-scale technology transformations and drive organizational change.
• Strong communication and executive presentation skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with enterprise observability platforms such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Solarwinds, or Databahn.
• Experience leading Capacity Planning functions across infrastructure, cloud, and application platforms.
• Experience supporting highly regulated industries, including financial services.
• Knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering principles, error budgets, SLOs, and reliability frameworks.
• Experience with automation and Infrastructure-as-Code practices.
• Familiarity with Agile, DevOps, and platform engineering models.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience managing or partnering closely with enterprise Infrastructure Operations teams.
• Working knowledge of BMC Helix, or other capacity planning tools.
• Experience supporting hybrid cloud environments and large-scale infrastructure monitoring ecosystems.
• Familiarity with IBM Z / mainframe performance and capacity management.

Additional Information

Benefits are an integral part of total rewards and First Citizens Bank is committed to providing a competitive, thoughtfully designed and quality benefits program to meet the needs of our associates. More information can be found at https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits.