Backblaze External Website - Sr. Manager - SRE

• Hire, lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers, including coaching, career development, and performance management. • Manage other engineering managers as required and help develop leadership capability within the organization. • Establish team goals, objectives, and reliability priorities, ensuring commitments are delivered or expectations are proactively reset when circumstances change. • Collaborate with engineering leaders across Backblaze to define strategic priorities and execution plans. • Develop and improve automation that accelerates the deployment of new storage vaults, core servers, and supporting infrastructure. • Own and improve vulnerability management and patching schedules to ensure contractual, operational, and security requirements are met. • Drive complex reliability initiatives from problem discovery through implementation and resolution. • Partner with engineering teams to improve observability, monitoring, and alerting and provide meaningful insight into the health and performance of Backblaze infrastructure. • Lead analysis of SLA and reliability performance, identify areas of risk, and drive corrective actions. • Participate in leadership on-call rotations, major incident response, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve service reliability. • Provide leadership during incidents and ensure root cause analyses, corrective actions, and follow-up work are completed effectively. • Partner with Engineering, Customer Success, Product, and Operations teams to support resilient system design and reliable production operations. • Engage with customers to understand their reliability needs and ensure stability priorities reflect customer experiences and business requirements. • Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and monitor SLA performance. • Lead cross-functional initiatives to identify gaps in observability, operational processes, reliability, and infrastructure management. • Identify recurring operational issues and develop long-term strategies and action plans to address them. • Document systems, share learnings, and promote a reliability-focused engineering culture across Backblaze. • The Right Fit • 10+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, infrastructure, or production operations, including significant engineering leadership experience. • Demonstrated experience building, managing, mentoring, and developing high-performing technical teams. • Experience leading reliability or infrastructure organizations operating large-scale, production-grade systems. • Strong understanding of deploying and managing large fleets of Linux hosts, with a strong emphasis on automation. • Strong knowledge of observability and monitoring technologies such as VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch, or comparable platforms. • Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, incident processes, and reliability practices at scale. • Strong understanding of storage systems, including storage performance, sharding, distributed architectures, and storage algorithms. • Understanding of load-balancing technologies and services, including IPVS or comparable technologies. • Experience managing security-focused infrastructure operations, including patching, hardening, vulnerability identification, and remediation. • Demonstrated ability to lead major incidents and post-incident processes, including root cause analysis and corrective action planning. • Experience using automation and AI-assisted technologies to improve engineering productivity, system performance, operational efficiency, or scalability. • Ability to independently take ownership of complex problems and drive initiatives from discovery through resolution. • Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with engineers, executives, customers, vendors, and cross-functional stakeholders. • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.