Senior SRE Engineering Manager – Reliability at Scale

Upstart; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual equity grants

401(k) retirement match

ESPP (US only)

Health coverage (medical, dental, and

Wellness resources

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Upstart is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for Site Reliability Engineering to lead reliability improvements across incident management, observability, and operational readiness. You will guide a hands-on team, translate strategy into actionable plans, and balance immediate needs with durable, scalable improvements in a fast‑growing, digital‑first environment.

You will partner with engineering leaders to set reliability expectations, identify systemic risks, and build scalable capabilities

Qualifications

• 5+ years of reliability engineering management experience and 7+ years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, infrastructure, or platform engineering
• Significant hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or an equivalent role responsible for operating and improving production systems
• Direct experience managing an SRE, Production Engineering, or equivalent reliability function, including ownership of its strategy, roadmap, operating model, and outcomes
• Strong technical depth in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and production operations
• Experience leading high severity incident response and improving incident management practices at scale
• Demonstrated ability to translate strategy into focused, capacity aware plans and deliver measurable outcomes
• Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high performing engineers and engineering leaders
• Strong cross-functional leadership and communication, with the ability to turn complex operational data into clear decisions and drive alignment across teams

Responsibilities

• Manage incident management, observability, operational readiness, and reliability engineering initiatives
• Define charter, priorities, roadmap, and measurable outcomes for the SRE function
• Translate strategy into capacity-aware plans with clear ownership and milestones
• Maintain delivery health visibility and intervene when needed
• Build a resilient operating model through cross-training and strong ownership
• Set a high bar for technical quality and executive communication
• Develop engineers and leaders who can independently own complex reliability initiatives
• Evolve incident management programs to improve detection, response, and learning
• Improve postmortem quality and drive durable engineering improvements
• Define service level objectives and align reliability efforts with product goals
• Establish scalability standards for new services and major launches
• Drive automation and resilience to reduce toil and risk
• Embed reliability into standard engineering workflows

Skills

Distributed systems

SRE management

Incident response

Observability

Engineering leadership

Tools

Datadog

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Upstart is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for Site Reliability Engineering to lead reliability improvements across incident management, observability, and operational readiness. You will guide a hands-on team, translate strategy into actionable plans, and balance immediate needs with durable, scalable improvements in a fast‑growing, digital‑first environment.

You will partner with engineering leaders to set reliability expectations, identify systemic risks, and build scalable capabilities