Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering

ServiceNow

United States

Remote

USD 210,000 - 270,000

Full time

9 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity package

Health, wellness, retirement benefits

Unlimited PTO and flexible work

Leadership coaching and executive dev

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. You will define reliability programs, establish standards, and drive transformation across internal platforms and SaaS offerings.

You will report to the VP of Engineering and partner with product, platform, and infrastructure leaders to implement SRE strategies, hire top talent, and shape a reliability-driven culture

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.

Responsibilities

Define SRE program from the ground up—charter, operating model, hiring strategy, and multi-year roadmap.
Establish SRE principles, practices, and standards across observability products and control plane offerings.
Create unified reliability frameworks for internal-facing and customer-facing systems.
Design SRE on-call rotations, incident response processes, and blameless postmortem culture.
Build and scale an SRE team, establish career levels and growth frameworks.

Skills

SRE leadership

Observability

Incident management

SRE tooling

Cloud platforms

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Monitoring

Job description

Company Description

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.

Job Description

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

Program building & strategy

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

Qualifications

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

Technical depth

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

Additional Information

Work Personas

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 globaltalentss@servicenow.com 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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