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ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering to build and lead a world-class SRE organization across observability and control plane product portfolios. This is a program-building role reporting to the VP of Engineering, responsible for architecting reliability programs that span internal platforms and commercial products, establishing SRE culture, practices, and tooling from the ground up.
Key responsibilities include:
**Program Building & Strategy**: Build an SRE program from scratch—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 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 for high-caliber SREs with platform and reliability expertise. Create mentorship and career development paths; foster SRE culture and continuous learning. Drive organizational transformation to 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. 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. Work with observability leadership on internal vs. commercial product strategy. 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.
**Requirements**
Required:
- 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 multi-team, multi-product environments—ability to establish standards and drive adoption
Preferred:
- 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 multi-year strategy from concept to maturity; comfortable with ambiguity and greenfield environments
- People transformation: proven ability to shift organizational mindsets; strong coaching and mentorship instincts; excellent communication skills
- Technical depth: hands-on SRE expertise; can code, debug, and architect solutions; deep understanding of observability, monitoring, and telemetry infrastructure; familiarity with multiple deployment models and cloud platforms
- Operational leadership: data-driven decision making; cross-functional influencing; bias toward action and iteration
