Principal SRE Lead: Cloud Reliability & Observability

Devopsroles; United States; Hybrid; USD 132,000 - 211,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Insurance coverage (medical, dental,  

Paid time off

Paid holidays

RRSP/401(k) plan

Equity awards

Remote or hybrid work

Job summary

Cerence Inc. is seeking a Principal SRE to lead the Site Reliability Engineering team and own the reliability function for our cloud-native automotive AI platform.

You will own the reliability roadmap, SLIs/SLAs, on-call model, and escalation paths, while guiding architecture and production readiness across global teams. This hands-on leadership role requires strong technical credibility, coaching, and collaboration with development and DevOps to ensure high availability and blameless

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in site reliability, DevOps, or cloud platform roles.
• Track record of setting technical direction and standards across a team.
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes, Docker, Istio).
• Experience with public cloud platforms (Azure primarily; AWS and Google Cloud).
• Familiarity with observability tooling (metrics pipelines, dashboards, alerting).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Flux).
• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language (Python, Go, Shell).
• Strong UNIX/Linux background, including system configuration, performance debugging, and network fundamentals.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and develop the SRE team across multiple locations.
• Define and drive the reliability roadmap, SLI/SLO/SLA frameworks, and on-call model.
• Serve as Tier 2 escalation point for major incidents; champion blameless postmortems.
• Set strategic direction for observability, metrics, dashboards, and alerting.
• Drive CI/CD automation and infrastructure-as-code practices; collaborate with DevOps and platform teams.
• Embed reliability into the SDLC and engage in architectural reviews; communicate risk clearly.

Skills

SRE leadership

Technical direction

Container orchestration

Cloud platforms

Observability tooling

CI/CD & IaC

Scripting languages

UNIX/Linux & Networking

English communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Istio

Terraform

Flux

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Cerence Inc. is seeking a Principal SRE to lead the Site Reliability Engineering team and own the reliability function for our cloud-native automotive AI platform.

You will own the reliability roadmap, SLIs/SLAs, on-call model, and escalation paths, while guiding architecture and production readiness across global teams. This hands-on leadership role requires strong technical credibility, coaching, and collaboration with development and DevOps to ensure high availability and blameless