Manager - Production Operations & Site Reliability Engineering

Alcon MX; Lake Forest (IL); On-site; USD 140,000 - 182,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Retirement plan

Paid time off (PTO)

Job summary

Alcon is seeking a Manager for Production Operations and Site Reliability Engineering to lead cloud-based healthcare platforms, drive reliability, and ensure compliant, scalable software delivery. You’ll own incident management, release governance, and automation across AWS, Kubernetes, and observability tooling.

You’ll collaborate with Product Engineering, Security, and Infrastructure teams, define performance objectives, and mentor engineers to improve MTTR and deployment success while

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +13 yrs; Assoc.+9 yrs; M.S.+2 yrs; PhD+0 yrs)
• The ability to fluently read, write, understand and communicate in English
• 5 Years of Relevant Experience and leadership in Production Operations/SRE

Responsibilities

• Lead Production Operations & Reliability for cloud-based healthcare platforms, ensuring high availability and performance
• Define and improve SLIs/SLOs, readiness reviews, and service-excellence practices
• Drive platform resilience, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and governance via SSOF
• Lead release governance and production readiness reviews for deployments
• Govern Road to Production across Validation, Staging, and Production with rollback plans and acceptance criteria
• Mentor teams on operational excellence and SRE best practices

Skills

Production Operations

Site Reliability Engineering

Cloud Operations

AWS

Kubernetes

Datadog

CI/CD

Automation

Security Compliance

Incident Management

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field

Master’s preferred

Tools

Kubernetes (CKA/CKS)

Docker

Istio

Datadog

CloudWatch

AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3)

Job description

Manager – Production Operations & Site Reliability Engineering At Alcon, we are driven by the meaningful work we do to help people see brilliantly. We innovate boldly, champion progress, and act with speed as the global leader in eye care. Here, you’ll be recognized for your commitment and contributions and see your career like never before. Together, we go above and beyond to make an impact in the lives of our patients and customers. We foster an inclusive culture and are looking for diverse, talented people to join Alcon. As a Principal Engineer you will provide technical leadership for the reliability, availability, security, and continuous improvement of Alcon’s Digital Health Cloud platform supporting Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) and customer-facing digital health applications. This role serves as the senior technical authority for production operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), driving platform reliability, observability, automation, incident management, release governance, and cloud optimization. Partnering across Product Engineering, Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, and Operations, the Principal Engineer enables resilient, compliant, and scalable healthcare platforms with predictable, high-quality software delivery.

In this role, a typical day will include:

• Production Operations & Reliability Lead steady-state operations for cloud-based healthcare platforms, ensuring high availability, reliability, and performance.
• Establish and continuously improve operational standards, SLIs/SLOs, readiness reviews, and service excellence practices.
• Drive platform resilience, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and governance through Alcon’s Steady State Operations Framework (SSOF).
• Release & Deployment Governance Lead production readiness reviews, ensuring applications meet operational, security, monitoring, compliance, and supportability requirements.
• Govern the Road to Production process across Validation, Staging, and Production environments, validating deployment readiness, infrastructure qualification, rollback plans, and acceptance criteria.
• Partner with Engineering and DevOps teams to improve release quality, deployment reliability, and change success through standardized governance and automation.
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Champion SRE best practices, leveraging automation and self‑healing capabilities to reduce operational toil.
• Improve service reliability and customer experience by reducing MTTD and MTTR and increasing deployment success rates.
• Lead incident investigations, root cause analyses, and long‑term corrective actions for critical production events.
• Cloud Platform Operations Provide technical leadership across AWS platforms including EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, AWS MQ, Route53, and Kubernetes/Istio.
• Optimize cloud infrastructure for scalability, resilience, security, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Observability & Automation Define enterprise observability strategies using Datadog, CloudWatch, distributed tracing, synthetic monitoring, centralized logging, and executive dashboards.
• Lead automation initiatives across deployments, monitoring, health validation, incident response, and operational workflows.
• Security & Compliance Ensure compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, FDA, and enterprise cybersecurity standards.
• Partner with Security teams to strengthen cloud security architecture, identity management, network segmentation, and operational controls.
• Technical Leadership Serve as the senior escalation point for major incidents, production events, and Hypercare operations.
• Mentor engineering teams on operational excellence, production engineering, and SRE best practices.
• Influence platform and architectural decisions that enhance operability, maintainability, resilience, and long‑term service reliability.
• Collaborate across Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, and Global Operations to advance platform stability and operational maturity.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING TO ALCON:

• Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +13 yrs; Assoc.+9 yrs; M.S.+2 yrs; PhD+0 yrs)
• The ability to fluently read, write, understand and communicate in English
• 5 Years of Relevant Experience

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s Degree in degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred)
• Experience in Production Operations, Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Cloud Operations
• Experience supporting regulated healthcare or medical device platforms
• AWS Solutions Architect or DevOps Professional certification
• Kubernetes (CKA/CKS) certification
• Experience with healthcare interoperability standards (HL7, FHIR, DICOM)
• Experience implementing Site Reliability Engineering practices within large-scale cloud environments
• AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, Route53, IAM, Load Balancers, CloudWatch)
• Kubernetes, Istio, Docker
• Datadog, APM, logging, distributed tracing, synthetic monitoring
• CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automation
• HIPAA, GDPR, FDA compliance
• Strong understanding of cloud networking, security, and high-availability architectures

HOW YOU CAN THRIVE AT ALCON:

• Benefit from working in a highly collaborative environment.
• Join Alcon’s mission to provide top-tier, innovative products to enhance sight, enhance lives, and grow your career.
• Alcon provides robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, PTO, and much more!

Alcon Careers See your impact at alcon.com/careers

Compensation and Benefits

• Alcon’s Total Rewards programs are designed to align incentives with business objectives, support our values and deliver long‑term value.
• Our compensation approach includes a combination of fixed and variable pay, with short‑term and long‑term incentive opportunities for eligible roles.
• The salary range posted represents the anticipated hiring range for this role.
• Actual compensation may vary based on factors such as experience, skills, location, and internal equity and may fall outside the posted range.
• Pay Range 140,250.00 - 181,500.00 Pay Frequency Annual
• Alcon is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participates in E-Verify.
• Alcon takes pride in maintaining a diverse environment and our policies are not to discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.
• Alcon is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities.
• If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process or in order to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an email to [e-mail] and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.

Alcon develops and manufactures innovative devices to serve the full life cycle of eye care needs. Its surgical group is one of the largest makers of equipment used for cataract removal and laser vision correction. Its consumer products include the well‑known Opti‑Free line of contact lens solutions and related products. Alcon, which was founded in 1945, sells its products in 180 countries worldwide.