Executive Director - SRE/Platform Strategy

Request Technology, LLC; Illinois; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Request Technology, LLC is seeking an Executive Director for SRE/Platform Strategy & Governance. This role involves managing an SRE team, ensuring compliance, and driving platform reliability. Candidates should possess significant experience in cloud engineering and SRE practices.

The position is a hybrid model with 3 days onsite and 2 remote. The role requires strong leadership focused on establishing and maintaining governance frameworks across platform services.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in cloud engineering, platform reliability, or infrastructure roles.
• Proven executive-level leadership in regulated environments.
• Experience in building SRE practices including SLO/SLA frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Lead the scaling and maturation of the SRE practice.
• Define and enforce reliability standards for platform services.
• Serve as a key technical advisor to senior leadership.

Skills

Cloud engineering

Platform reliability

Infrastructure roles

SRE tooling

Cloud architecture strategy

Governance frameworks

CI/CD tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

***Hybrid, 3 days onsite, 2 days remote***

***We are unable to sponsor as this is a permanent full-time role***

A prestigious company is looking for a Executive Director – SRE/Platform Strategy & Governance. This director will manage a team of SRE’s for platform engineering governance, compliance, and site reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the scaling and maturation of the SRE practice, establishing error budgets, SLOs, SLAs, and incident response frameworks across all platform services.
• Define and enforce reliability standards including on-call models, blameless postmortem processes, and corrective action tracking to drive continuous improvement.
• Partner with Platform Foundation teams (Kubernetes, Kafka, FinOps/Security) to embed reliability principles into build and operate models.
• Serve as Product Manager for the FinOps and SecOps domains within Platform Engineering, owning the product vision, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment for governance tooling and practices.
• Establish and maintain a governance framework ensuring Platform Engineering adheres to organizational standards across incident and problem management, SORTs, risk tracking, and audit findings.
• Own the end-to-end process for PE compliance obligations, ensuring timely resolution and closure of incidents, problem tickets, risk items, and audit observations with clear accountability and tracking.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Security functions to proactively identify governance gaps, drive remediation, and ensure PE operates within the organization's risk appetite.
• Lead the scaling and maturation of the SRE practice, establishing error budgets, SLOs, SLAs, and incident response frameworks across all platform services.
• Define and enforce reliability standards including on-call models, blameless postmortem processes, and corrective action tracking to drive continuous improvement.
• Partner with Platform Engineering Product teams (Kubernetes, Kafka, FinOps/Security) to embed reliability principles into build and operate models.
• Define and execute the multi-year cloud architecture strategy aligned to business growth, scalability, regulatory compliance, and cost optimization goals.
• Establish cloud architectural standards, reference architectures, and governance frameworks (landing zones, identity, network patterns, service catalog) and drive adoption across engineering.
• Guide cloud-native architecture decisions including containers/orchestration, IaaS/PaaS adoption, disaster recovery, and multi-region patterns with a steady eye on regulatory requirements (e.g., CIS, NIST).
• Serve as a key technical advisor to senior leadership, translating complex architectural trade-offs into clear business decisions.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree, preferably in a technical discipline (Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or related field), or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 15+ years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, platform reliability, or infrastructure roles with at least 5 years in senior engineering leadership.
• Proven executive-level leadership of SRE, cloud engineering, or platform reliability organizations in a regulated industry environment.
• Demonstrated ability to build and scale SRE practices including SLO/SLA frameworks, on-call models, error budgets, and incident response programs.
• Deep expertise in cloud architecture strategy and governance, with experience defining and driving enterprise-wide architectural standards.
• Demonstrated experience serving in a Product Manager capacity for technical domains such as FinOps, SecOps, or platform tooling, including ownership of roadmap, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment.
• Experience establishing and managing governance and compliance frameworks within a platform or infrastructure engineering organization, including oversight of incidents, problem management, risk items, and audit obligations.
• Ability to design and maintain metrics and reporting frameworks that provide meaningful visibility into platform health, engineering performance, and compliance posture.
• Deep knowledge of SRE tooling and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty, Datadog, or equivalents).
• Expert-level knowledge of cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, or GCP; experience with multi-cloud or hybrid environments preferred.
• Strong working knowledge of cloud-native architecture patterns and Infrastructure as Code principles.
• Familiarity with container orchestration and streaming platforms (Kubernetes, Kafka) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalents).
• Experience with metrics and reporting platforms; ability to design KPI frameworks and reporting dashboards for both technical and executive audiences.
• Working knowledge of FinOps principles and cloud cost governance, with experience driving cost transparency and optimization at an organizational level.
• Familiarity with SecOps tooling and security governance practices within a cloud or platform engineering context.