Lead SRE - Incident Response & Automation

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 186,000 - 232,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Retirement savings

Paid time off

Family planning programs

Job summary

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is seeking an SRE Lead to steer ProdOps as a senior technical leader. This hybrid role requires guiding incident response, improving observability, and mentoring engineers while driving systemic action items to prevent recurrence.

The role emphasizes leadership in incident management, blameless post-incident learning, and automation to reduce toil, with collaboration across cloud, vehicle development pipelines, and product security.)

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in SRE, production/platform engineering, or systems engineering for large-scale distributed systems, including senior technical leadership or lead responsibilities.
• Proven incident command experience coordinating high-severity incidents and leading executive communications.
• Strong systems engineering fundamentals across distributed systems, networking, cloud infrastructure, and failure modes.
• Hands-on coding ability (Python, Go) to build automation, tooling, and integrations.
• Deep observability expertise: instrumentation, metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, dashboards, and SLO/SLI design (Datadog or similar).
• Fluency in reliability practices: LFI, HOWIE, systemic analysis.
• Bias toward eliminating toil through automation, and enthusiasm for AI agents as force multipliers.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to translate tech detail for executives.
• Experience mentoring engineers and growing into people management.

Responsibilities

• Lead incident coordination and cross-functional response during crises.
• Run blameless post-incident reviews and surface systemic improvements.
• Prioritize and drive action items from reviews in partnership with TPMs and development teams.
• Measure efficacy post-fix and feed results into improvement metrics.
• Design and build automation, observability backbone, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Lead and grow ProdOps team, setting standards and hiring as the team scales.

Skills

Incident command

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Python/Go coding

Observability

Communication

Mentoring

Automation bias

Tools

Python

Go

Datadog

Job description

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is seeking an SRE Lead to steer ProdOps as a senior technical leader. This hybrid role requires guiding incident response, improving observability, and mentoring engineers while driving systemic action items to prevent recurrence.

The role emphasizes leadership in incident management, blameless post-incident learning, and automation to reduce toil, with collaboration across cloud, vehicle development pipelines, and product security.)