Senior Engineering Manager, SRE - Remote, US

Paylocity; United States; Remote; USD 143,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a leading provider of cloud-based HR and payroll software solutions as a Senior Manager of Engineering – SRE. You will ensure platform stability and performance while leading high-performing teams. This fully remote role requires deep technical expertise and a passion for innovation in a dynamic environment.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) match

Career development support

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in engineering or infrastructure roles, with 3+ years in SRE or DevOps leadership.
• Strong technical background in software development, cloud platforms, or scalable architectures.
• Experience managing large-scale SaaS infrastructure and building incident management programs.

Responsibilities

• Lead multiple high-performing SRE teams to build reliable solutions.
• Drive structured project execution to ensure timely delivery.
• Own design and evolution of monitoring systems for service health.

Skills

Incident lifecycle management

Observability solutions design

Communication

Project management

Mentoring and team development

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

Datadog

New Relic

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Paylocity is an equal opportunity employer.

Paylocity is an award-winning provider of cloud-based HR and payroll software solutions, offering the most complete platform for the modern workforce. The company has become one of the fastest-growing HCM software providers worldwide by offering an intuitive, easy-to-use product suite that helps businesses automate and streamline HR and payroll processes, attract and retain talent, and build a strong workplace culture.

While traditional HR and payroll providers automate basic HR processes such as payroll and benefits administration, Paylocity goes further by developing tools that HR and businesses need to compete for talent and deliver against the expectations of the modern workforce.

We give our employees what they need to succeed, including great benefits and perks! We offer medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and a 401(k) match, as well as perks that support you, your family, and your finances. And if it’s career development you desire, we provide that, too! At Paylocity, people matter most and have always been at the heart of our business.

Help Paylocity enhance communication and enable employees to connect, collaborate, and create from anywhere with a position in Product & Technology!

Want to develop the strategies and principles needed to deliver compelling software? Join our team and help us enhance our all-in-one software platform, elevate our one-of-a-kind technology, and improve the employee experience.

Take your career to the next level at one of G2's Top 100 Software Companies. Explore our Product & Technology positions to see where you fit!

Position Overview

At Paylocity, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that safeguards product stability, service quality, and system performance — all of which directly impact revenue protection and customer satisfaction. The Senior Manager of Engineering – SRE plays a pivotal role in ensuring that our platform remains available, performant, and scalable. By owning core reliability functions in Incident Management, Observability, and Release Management, this leader enables our product and engineering teams to move quickly and confidently, focusing on growing top-line revenue while ensuring our infrastructure can sustain rapid growth and complexity. This role demands strategic vision, deep technical expertise, and a passion for building resilient, customer-centric systems.

This is a critical role in leading and scaling high-performing engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and high-quality SaaS solutions that support our Human Capital Management (HCM) platform. This role requires a hands-on technical leader with strong project execution skills, a focus on engineering best practices, and the ability to align technical initiatives with business objectives. The Senior Manager will be responsible for driving team performance, improving development processes, and ensuring successful product delivery while collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Security, and Go-To-Market teams. This role requires a balance of technical expertise, leadership, and business acumen.

Primary Responsibilities

The below represents the primary duties of the position; others may be assigned as needed. To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.??

• Lead and Manage Engineering Teams: Lead multiple high-performing SRE teams in building scalable, reliable solutions aligned with business and customer goals.
• Drive Execution and Delivery: Drive structured project execution with clear strategies, milestones, and deliverables, ensuring timely and predictable delivery across parallel workstreams.
• Incident Detection and Monitoring: Own the design and evolution of comprehensive monitoring systems to ensure early detection of issues and maintain real-time visibility into service health.
• Incident Response: Guide teams through structured, high-urgency incident response processes, minimizing customer impact and ensuring fast, effective resolution.
• Communication and Coordination: Act as the central coordination point during major incidents, ensuring effective internal and external communication across engineering, leadership, and customer-facing teams.
• Incident Mitigation and Resolution: Lead root cause identification and mitigation strategies, implementing both short-term fixes and long-term preventative solutions.
• Post-Incident Reviews: Champion a culture of blameless retrospectives to identify learnings and drive continual operational and architectural improvements.
• Automation and Resilience Engineering: Promote automation of manual processes and embed resilience engineering principles to improve fault tolerance, recovery, and system durability.
• Continuous Improvement: Foster a data-informed culture of experimentation and iteration focused on reducing toil, improving reliability, and increasing development velocity.
• Observability and APM Management: Drive observability strategy, ensuring actionable insights via metrics, logs, and traces; manage the application performance monitoring (APM) stack to detect and diagnose performance issues.
• Release Management: Partner with development and QA to manage safe, reliable, and efficient release processes with minimal downtime and strong rollback strategies.
• Culture and Advocacy: Advocate for SRE principles and embed a reliability-first mindset across engineering, emphasizing operational excellence and proactive risk management.
• Engineering Strategy and Collaboration: Collaborate with Product, Security, and Business stakeholders to align infrastructure reliability efforts with strategic priorities and customer needs.
• Mentorship and Team Development: Coach and mentor engineers and managers, cultivating a high-performance, inclusive team culture centered on continuous learning and innovation.
• Resource and Capacity Planning: Manage team capacity and resource planning to ensure optimal alignment of talent and project needs, enabling scalable growth.
• Engineering Metrics and Optimization: Leverage engineering and operational metrics to drive improvements in system quality, team velocity, incident response, and technical debt management.
• Innovation and Technical Leadership: Stay current on emerging trends and innovations in infrastructure, tooling, observability, and reliability; apply forward-thinking approaches to improve the engineering foundation.

Education and Experience

Education:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.

Experience:

• 8+ years of experience in engineering or infrastructure roles, including 3+ years in an SRE or DevOps leadership role.
• Proven experience managing large-scale SaaS infrastructure and leading high-performing, distributed SRE teams.
• Demonstrated success building incident management programs and leading critical incident responses.
• Strong technical background in software development, cloud platforms, DevOps, or scalable architectures.
• Proven ability to manage projects, aligning technical execution with business priorities.

Skills:

• Deep understanding of incident lifecycle management including detection, on-call processes, coordination during high-severity events, root cause analysis, and follow-through on corrective actions.
• Expertise in designing and implementing observability solutions using tools like Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry, etc., with a strong focus on actionable alerting and meaningful dashboards.
• Proficient in release management and deployment practices; experience with canary releases, feature flags, rollback strategies, and minimizing deployment risk through automation.
• Skilled in reducing toil through scripting, automation, and resilience engineering patterns (e.g., circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads).
• Exceptional communicator capable of translating complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and leading teams through ambiguity and high-pressure situations.
• Adept at using SLIs/SLOs, incident data, and engineering KPIs to inform strategy, optimize performance, and demonstrate the value of reliability work.
• A strong sense of curiosity, with a passion for innovation, continuous learning, and staying ahead of industry trends.
• Routine leadership, project management, and collaboration skills.
• Passion for mentorship, team development, and inclusive engineering culture.
• Excellent collaboration skills, with experience partnering across Product, Security, and Business teams.
• Strong problem-solving skills, adaptability to change, and a willingness to learn in a fast-paced environment.

This is a fully remote position, allowing you to work from home or location of record within the U.S. with no in-office requirements. You must be available five days per week during designated work hours. The work arrangement for this role is subject to change based on business needs and individual performance. This may include adjustments to on-site requirements or schedule expectations, as necessary.

Paylocity is an equal-opportunity employer. Paylocity is committed to the full inclusion of all individuals. We recruit, train, compensate, and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law. At Paylocity, we believe diversity makes us better.

We embrace and encourage our employees’ differences in age, culture, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion or spiritual belief, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our employees unique. We actively cultivate these differences through our employee resource groups (ERGs), employee experiences, perspectives, talents, and approaches to drive innovation in the software and services we provide our customers.

We comply with federal and state disability laws and make reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. To request reasonable accommodation in the job application or interview process, please contact [e-mail] opens in a new tab . This email address is exclusively designated for such requests, aligning with federal and state disability laws. Please do not send resumes to this email address, as they will be removed.

The base pay range for this position is $143k - $265k/yr; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This position is eligible for an annual bonus and restricted stock unit grant based on individual performance in addition to a full range of benefits outlined here. This information is provided per the relevant state and local pay transparency laws for the location in which this position will be performed. Base pay information is based on market location. Applicants should apply via www.paylocity.com/careers.

At Paylocity, “We” is what makes us different. We are committed to fostering aculture that honors diverse opinions, perspectives, and backgrounds, knowing that each makes us stronger andcollectively unbeatable together. We actively cultivate these differences as we engage each other in drivinginnovation in the software and services we provide our customers. Paylocity is an equal opportunityemployer.If you are an individual with a disability and you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation during theapplication process, please contact our services team at [phone].