Lead Site Reliability Engineer - Allergan Aesthetics

AbbVie Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid time off

Medical/Dental/Vision insurance

401(k) plan

Job summary

AbbVie Inc. in Seattle is seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to helm reliability and performance of the company's public-facing services. You will lead SRE initiatives, champion observability, and drive capacity planning and incident responses across the Cloud Platform team.

You will mentor engineers, define SLO/SLI frameworks, and partner with development to improve resilience, security, and operational excellence while aligning with business goals.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience leading SRE programs for large-scale, public-facing software.
• Proficiency with observability platforms and incident management.
• Experience with Terraform and Kubernetes on AWS.

Responsibilities

• Define and champion SLO/SLI frameworks and error budget-based prioritization.
• Own observability strategy across services with metrics, logs and traces.
• Lead capacity planning, load testing, and resilience/chaos testing.
• Establish production readiness reviews and partner on release procedures.
• Identify toil and automate with self-healing systems.
• Drive performance tuning via metrics from systems and apps.
• Contribute reliability improvements using infrastructure-as-code and Kubernetes.
• Mentor engineers and promote operational excellence across teams.

Skills

Observability

SRE

Automation

Python

Go

Terraform

Kubernetes

Datadog

Tools

Datadog

AWS

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

About AbbVie

At Allergan Aesthetics, an AbbVie company, we develop, manufacture, and market a portfolio of leading aesthetics brands and products. Our aesthetics portfolio includes facial injectables, body contouring, plastics, skin care, and more. Our goal is to consistently provide our customers with innovation, education, exceptional service, and a commitment to excellence, all with a personal touch. For more information, visit https://global.allerganaesthetics.com/. Follow Allergan Aesthetics on LinkedIn.

The Lead Site Reliability Engineer will continuously collaborate with key stakeholders across the business to solve critical technical problems for Allergan Aesthetics. You will be a hands-on technical leader driving reliability, availability, and operational excellence for large-scale public-facing software. As part of the Cloud Platform team, you will own how we measure, protect, and improve production reliability — championing SRE practices, building resilience into our platform, and ensuring our services meet the availability and performance standards our customers expect. You will provide technical thought leadership, mentor engineers across the organization, and turn small ideas into high-fidelity technical game plans that achieve both reliability and business goals.

Reliability Engineering:

• Define and champion SLO/SLI frameworks and error budget-based decision making to drive prioritization between reliability and feature work.
• Own observability strategy across services — metrics, logs, traces, and alerting — ensuring signals are actionable and tied to user impact.
• Lead capacity planning, load testing, and resilience/chaos testing for critical public-facing services.
• Establish production readiness reviews and partner with development teams to improve services through rigorous testing and release procedures.
• Identify and eliminate toil through automation, self-healing systems, and improved observability.
• Gather and analyze metrics from operating systems and applications to drive performance tuning and fault finding.
• Contribute reliability improvements to the platform through infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and Kubernetes configuration, working within Cloud Platform team standards.

Incident Management & Response:

• Own and evolve the incident response process, including severity definitions, escalation paths, and postmortem practice.
• Participate in on-call rotations and provide hands-on support during incidents with appropriate urgency.
• Troubleshoot and resolve infrastructure and application issues, driving blameless root cause analysis and tracking corrective actions to completion.

Standards & Architecture:

• Champion reliability, scalability, and security standards across AA Tech services and the AA Tech product platform.
• Partner and inform strategic architecture decisions for new services and major platform changes for reliability risks (failure modes, redundancy, scaling limits, alerting) before launch as part of Cloud Platform design reviews.
• Define and maintain reliability standards (e.g., SLO coverage, alerting, runbooks, backup and recovery requirements) and track how services meet them
• Stay current with the latest trends in site/service reliability practices and tooling. Identify proven technologies and solutions for emerging challenges.

Technical Mentorship:

• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to senior-level DevOps and Software Engineers utilizing proven design patterns and experience building large-scale public-facing software.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence, knowledge sharing, and continuous learning across the engineering organization.
• Provide technical thought leadership to implement strategic architecture, systems, and projects on the roadmap.

Proven track record running SLO/error budget programs and incident management for large-scale production systems.

• Deep experience with observability platforms (e.g., Datadog) and alert design.
• Working proficiency with Terraform and Kubernetes on AWS; comfortable reading, reviewing, and contributing infrastructure code.
• Strong scripting/programming skills (e.g., Python, Go) for automation and tooling.

Preferred:

• Hands-on experience using or building agentic AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, MCP-based integrations) to automate engineering or operational workflows, with appropriate guardrails and human oversight.

Applicable only to applicants applying to a position in any location with pay disclosure requirements under state or local law:

The compensation range described below is the range of possible base pay compensation that the Company believes in good faith it will pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual compensation paid within this range will depend on many factors including geographic location, and we may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off (vacation, holidays, sick), medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.

This job is eligible to participate in our long-term incentive programs.

Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, incentive, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole and absolute discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole and absolute discretion, consistent with applicable law.

AbbVie is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to operating with integrity, driving innovation, transforming lives and serving our community. Equal Opportunity Employer/Veterans/Disabled.

US & Puerto Rico only - to learn more, visit https://www.abbvie.com/join-us/equal-employment-opportunity-employer.html

US & Puerto Rico applicants seeking a reasonable accommodation, click here to learn more: https://www.abbvie.com/join-us/reasonable-accommodations.html