Engineering Manager, SRE
Remote
WorldwideremotePosted 1 month ago
Skill Required
Site-Reliability-EngineeringEngineering-ManagementPlatform-EngineeringInfrastructure-EngineeringCloud-EngineerSRE-ManagerSite-Reliability-Engineering-ManagerEngineering-ManagerSRE-LeadSite Reliability EngineerEngineering ManagerEngineeringSOCShell ScriptingGitHub ActionsObservabilityPostgreSQLKubernetesautomationTerraformNode.jssecuritybuildingJenkinsPythonDockerdesignDevOpsGitLinuxCI/CDCloudDesign PatternsjQueryJavaAWSFulltime
Key highlights
- Salary: $75,450—$169,700 USD
- Role: 60% IC / 40% Leadership
- Direct reports: 4
- Location: Fully Remote (Global)
- Key Benefit: 16 weeks paid parental leave
- Notable Requirement: Hands-on AI building and scaling
Role overview
Remote is solving modern organizations’ biggest challenge – navigating global employment compliantly with ease, making it possible for businesses of all sizes to recruit, pay, and manage international teams. Remote's SRE team exists so that engineers can move quickly and customers get a product that stays up, owning Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, CI infrastructure, the observability stack, and the reliability practices that sit on top of all of it. We are looking for a Team Leader to run the SRE team in a role that is 60% Individual Contributor (IC) and 40% leadership. You will own the career development of your reports, steer the team's focus using judgment against company goals, act as the spokesperson for the team across engineering, and stay close enough to technical work to set direction with credibility and identify issues before they are escalated.
Responsibilities
- Own the career development of your reports.
- Steer the team's focus using judgment against the company goals.
- Act as the spokesperson for the team across engineering and to senior leadership.
- Stay close enough to the technical work to set direction with credibility and to know when something is going wrong before it is escalated to you.
- Manage the full career lifecycle of your reports: onboarding, feedback, performance assessment, progression and hiring.
- Maintain team health, dynamics and the retrospective habit that keeps them honest.
- Define the SRE goals: what the team commits to, in what order, and why.
- Manage the support rotation and on-call model.
- Oversee Remote's core infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, DNS and TLS, CI infrastructure.
- Manage the reliability practice: SLOs, error budgets, incident response and the observability stack.
- Partner with the Security team on threats, patching and infrastructure controls, including audit and compliance obligations.
- Manage vendor relationships that sit behind the platform, including renewals and commercial conversations with support from your Director.
Requirements
- Led an SRE, infrastructure or platform engineering team.
- Owned reports' growth, performance and career progression rather than just their sprints.
- Coach both craft and the soft skills, with a history of people growing because of it.
- Handle underperformance directly and early, with clarity and empathy.
- Experience hiring engineers and the ability to tell the difference between a good interview and a good engineer.
- Read team dynamics well and resolve conflict rather than routing around it.
- Natural talent fostering commitment to the goals of the company.
- A hands-on background in site reliability, DevOps or cloud infrastructure engineering, deep enough that you can review your team's work, challenge a design and be taken seriously in an incident.
- Kubernetes in production, including the operational reality of it rather than the happy path.
- AWS at meaningful scale.
- Hands on AI building, enablement, scaling AI infrastructure.
- Solid observability (o11y) practices and principles.
- Infrastructure as code with Terraform.
- CI/CD systems such as GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
- Docker and shell scripting.
- Experience running a reliability practice: incident response, on-call, SLOs and error budgets, and the discipline of turning incidents into changes that stick.
- Understanding and history of working in regulated environments.
- Prioritise exceptionally well when operational load and project work compete, and protect team's focus without dropping the operational commitment.
- Write clearly for a fully distributed and async environment where most leadership happens in writing.
- Build relationships across teams.
- Automation and AI capabilities are requirements for every role at Remote.
Nice to have
- Working knowledge of a backend language, ideally Elixir, or otherwise Java, Clojure, Node.js, Python or similar.
- Depth in modern observability: OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and tools such as Honeycomb.
- Database operations experience, particularly PostgreSQL or Aurora performance, connection pool health and query tuning.
- Running and configuring Linux systems outside a cloud environment.
- Security capability from both a defensive and an offensive standpoint.
- Cloud cost management and FinOps.
- Experience growing a team from a small base, including building the hiring bar as you go.
Benefits
- Work from anywhere
- Flexible paid time off
- Flexible working hours (async)
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- Mental health support services
- Stock options
- Learning budget
- Home office budget & IT equipment
- Budget for local in-person social events or co-working spaces
Additional details
- Remote works asynchronously and is fully remote across 6 continents.
- Innovation is a core value.
- Reliability practice at Remote is maturing rather than mature; SLO framework is live on its first few teams and needs to reach the rest.
- Role split: 60% IC, 40% leadership.
- Report to: Director of Engineering, Platform.
- Team: Site Reliability Engineering, part of Platform Engineering.
- Direct reports: 4.
- Location: Anywhere in the world. Current coverage is strongest in EMEA and APAC; candidates overlapping with those or helping close the Americas gap are welcome.
- Start date: As soon as possible.
- Application process: Interview with recruiter, Interview with hiring manager, Scenario interview with a peer team leader, Executive interview, Bar Raiser interview, Offer + Prior employment verification check.
- Total Rewards philosophy: fair, unbiased compensation and fair equity pay along with competitive benefits; pay above in-location rates.
- Salary ranges use geo ranges to consider geographic pay differentials and are determined by role, level, location, and market demands.
- Internal mobility is supported with compensation changes reviewed for pay equity.
- Annual salary range: $75,450—$169,700 USD.
- Work async allows for planning schedules around life; default to action; family-first culture.
- Application requirements: Submit application and CV in English, PDF format preferred (LinkedIn profile copy also accepted).
- Optional pronoun and anonymous demographic questionnaire included at application/interview stages.
- Applications accepted on an ongoing basis.