Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering

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
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

Employment type
Full-time

Work arrangement
No