Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering

ServiceNow; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering to build and lead a world-class SRE organization across observability and control plane product portfolios. Define strategy, establish standards, and drive organizational transformation starting from scratch or scaling pockets.

Report to engineering leadership and partner across product, platform, and infrastructure teams. The role focuses on defining SRE charter, hiring strategy, and multi-year roadmaps, with a strong

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or reliability engineering at scale
• 5+ years in leadership roles (director or principal engineer)
• Demonstrated track record building SRE programs from scratch or scaling immature programs—with measurable business impact
• Strong evidence of driving people and organizational transformation; ability to shift culture from reactive to proactive reliability
• Deep expertise in SRE practices: SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems, on-call design, toil reduction
• Hands-on experience with observability platforms (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting)
• Experience operating both internal platforms and commercial products (SaaS)
• Comfort with multi-team, multi-product environments—establishing standards and driving adoption

Responsibilities

• Define SRE strategy and multi-year roadmap
• Build and scale SRE teams across observability and control plane domains
• Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for products and operationalize them
• Lead reliability culture initiatives and blameless postmortems
• Collaborate with product and infrastructure leaders to embed SRE thinking in design and development

Skills

SRE leadership

Program building

Reliability engineering

Observability

On-call design

Mentoring

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Monitoring systems

Job description

Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering

• Full-time
• Employee Type: Regular
• Region: AMS - North America and Canada
• Work Persona: Flexible or Remote

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow— helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started.

Join us to put AI to work for people.

Position overview

ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering to build and lead a world-class SRE organization across our observability and control plane product portfolios. You will architect reliability programs that span internal platforms and commercial products, establishing SRE culture, practices, and tooling from the ground up.

This is a program-building role. You will define SRE strategy, set operational standards, build teams (starting from scratch or scaling existing pockets), and drive measurable people and organizational transformation. You will report to the VP of Engineering and partner with product, platform, and infrastructure leaders across multiple business units.

Key responsibilities

Build an SRE program from the ground up—define charter, operating model, hiring strategy, and multi-year roadmap

Establish SRE principles, practices, and standards across observability products (OODP, metrics, alerting) and control plane offerings

Create unified reliability frameworks that work for both internal-facing and customer-facing systems

Design SRE on-call rotations, incident response processes, and blameless postmortem culture

Team leadership & people transformation

Build and scale an SRE team from existing base across observability and control plane domains

Design hiring criteria and interview processes that attract high-caliber SREs with platform and reliability expertise

Create mentorship and career development paths; foster SRE culture and continuous learning

Drive organizational transformation: shift product and infrastructure teams toward reliability-first mindsets

Establish clear SRE career levels, expectations, and growth frameworks

Reliability & operational excellence

Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for observability and control plane products; operationalize them

Build AI native toil reduction initiatives; automate repetitive operational work across SRE and product teams

Own incident management: design escalation policies, postmortem practices, and continuous improvement loops

Partner with platform/infrastructure teams to improve reliability infrastructure (CI/CD, deployment systems, monitoring)

Establish reliability metrics, dashboards, and reporting for leadership visibility

Cross-functional alignment

Partner with product teams to embed SRE thinking in design and development of new features

Work with observability leadership on internal vs. commercial product strategy—tailor SRE programs accordingly

Collaborate with customer success and support on customer-facing reliability; define SLA/SLO communication

Partner with infrastructure and platform teams on shared services, runbooks, and operational tooling

Engage with security and compliance on reliability-related governance and risk

Required qualifications

12+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or reliability engineering at scale

5+ years in leadership roles (director or principal engineer) managing SRE or reliability teams of 10+ engineers

Demonstrated track record building SRE programs from scratch or scaling immature programs—with measurable business impact

Strong evidence of driving people and organizational transformation; ability to shift culture from reactive to proactive reliability

Deep expertise in SRE practices: SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems, on-call design, toil reduction

Hands-on experience with observability platforms (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting)

Experience operating both internal platforms and commercial products (SaaS)

Comfort with the messy reality of multi-team, multi-product environments—ability to establish standards and drive adoption

Preferred qualifications

Experience with control plane architectures or platform-as-a-service systems

Background building SRE programs in hybrid or multi-cloud deployments

Track record of mentoring and developing other SRE/platform leaders

Familiarity with chaos engineering, reliability testing, or resilience frameworks

Open-source contribution or thought leadership in SRE community

Core competencies

Program building

Ability to define a charter, secure stakeholder buy-in, and execute a multi-year strategy from concept to maturity

Comfortable with ambiguity and building in greenfield environments

People transformation

Proven ability to shift organizational mindsets—making reliability a shared responsibility, not just an SRE function

Strong coaching and mentorship instincts; creates environments where people grow

Excellent communication skills—able to articulate reliability concepts to engineers, product managers, and executives

Hands-on SRE expertise; can code, debug, and architect solutions alongside the team

Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, and telemetry infrastructure

Familiarity with multiple deployment models, cloud platforms, and operational challenges

Operational leadership

Data-driven decision making; comfortable with SLOs, metrics, and evidence-based practices

Cross-functional influencing; ability to drive change without direct authority

Bias toward action and iteration—comfort making decisions with incomplete information

What we offer

Competitive salary and equity package

Comprehensive health, wellness, and retirement benefits

Unlimited PTO and flexible work arrangements

Leadership coaching and executive development

The opportunity to build a world-class SRE organization and shape reliability culture across critical product lines

JV20

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here . To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact [e-mail] for assistance.

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities.

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