Director, SRE & Quality Engineering

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

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.