Tech Lead Manager: SRE, Observability & Reliability

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 198,000 - 416,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401(k) match

Parental leave

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Paid sick days

Paid personal time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a seasoned Site Reliability Engineer/leader to guide a team responsible for building and operating large-scale, distributed systems across service meshes. You will own reliability through architectural decisions, observability, and robust incident response, while mentoring engineers and driving security initiatives.

The role emphasizes balancing technical leadership with people management, shaping roadmaps for automation, and fostering cross-team

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing, analyzing and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience leading a small to mid-size team while maintaining hands-on technical contributions.
• Strong understanding of Unix/Linux OS internals and networking fundamentals.
• Proficiency in producing production-grade code in Go, Python, Java or similar languages.
• Proven track record of implementing SRE best practices across engineering orgs.
• Experience developing and maintaining SLOs and error budgets.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to a team of Site Reliability Engineers focused on building observable, fault-tolerant systems.
• Drive architectural decisions for large-scale, globally distributed service mesh architectures.
• Establish and maintain production ownership models, incident response protocols, and service level objectives.
• Develop strategic roadmaps for observability and automation initiatives that enhance system reliability.
• Balance technical contributions with people management responsibilities, including career development, performance evaluations, and team growth.
• Foster a culture of reliability, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing within your team and across the organization.
• Lead security initiatives to safeguard critical assets, partnering with security and compliance teams to implement robust protocols that ensure data protection and regulatory compliance across all services.

Skills

Distributed systems

SRE leadership

Go

Python

Java

SLOs

Unix/Linux

Incident response

Mentorship

Job description

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a seasoned Site Reliability Engineer/leader to guide a team responsible for building and operating large-scale, distributed systems across service meshes. You will own reliability through architectural decisions, observability, and robust incident response, while mentoring engineers and driving security initiatives.

The role emphasizes balancing technical leadership with people management, shaping roadmaps for automation, and fostering cross-team