Senior Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Key Responsibilities

Capacity Ingestion and Management:

-       Oversees an organization, comprised of multiple teams designing and architecting infrastructure and/or service, establishing reliability and functionality standards.

-       Determines direction for other managers to ensure Site Reliability Engineering teams are able to forecast infrastructure demands and strategically respond to capacity needs, ensuring systems have sufficient resources to handle current and future workloads, anticipating and resolving resource gaps.

-       Establishes and encourages collaborative relationships with the software development team in designing and developing infrastructures that are highly reliable and scalable, removing barriers to meet deployment requirements.

-       Develops and recommends strategic plans for prototyping and encourages the implementation of prototyping initiatives (e.g., testing new applications or infrastructures, assisting in onboarding), driving new approaches.

Incident and Service Lifecycle Management:

-       Oversees the results of data collection, triage, technical analysis, and redirection to maintain and optimize operations and infrastructure reliability, ensuring a shared understanding across Site Reliability Engineering teams.

-       Develops techniques for monitoring services, maintaining up-to-date knowledge of their performance, and meticulously documenting their condition.

-       Determines best practices for performing root cause analyses for incidents and/or maintenance on assigned services (e.g., software installs, version upgrades, security updates, backup and recovery), ensuring efficient execution and preventing incident reoccurrence.

-       Shares standards for providing strategic, future-oriented health and performance reporting, and encourages the organization to identify and anticipate actions needed based on trends in data.

-       Designs protocols for performing provisioning to support infrastructure, applications, and services.

-       Creates standards for decommissioning, fostering a culture that encourages leveraging non-conventional approaches and experimentation in decommissioning approaches (e.g., shutting down servers, removing data from databases) to remove objects that are no longer needed.

Automation:

-       Develops standards and provides strategic direction for automation opportunities, seeking maximum benefits in terms of metrics for the organization and ensuring expectations are met.

-       Sets expectations for developing and implementing design, automation tools, or scripts.

-       Determines strategies for conducting testing to ensure automation effectiveness.

-       Provides thought leadership and encourages teams across Site Reliability Engineering testing automations to leverage innovative approaches.

Technical Communication and Guidance:

-       Sets expectations for release notes and communicating information on the scale, capacity, security, performance attributes, and requirements of services and technology to customers, cross-functional teams, leadership, and external stakeholders.

-       Anticipates, analyzes, and effectively explains the nuanced impacts of infrastructure, feature, and tool changes, considering the organization's strategic goals, industry trends, and emerging technologies.

-       Fosters a culture that encourages communication and shared knowledge.

Troubleshooting and Resolution:

-       Determines approaches and best practices for escalating and resolving high-impact, critical incidents and highly complex issues across Oracle services.

-       Establishes best practices for reviewing service performance and resolving multifaceted technical issues spanning multiple services, functions, and customers, collaborating with executive-level leaders and advocating for leveraging advanced investigation and debugging techniques to ensure the achievement of SLOs (service level objectives).

-       Develops incident documentation and root cause analysis standards, recommending best practices, insights, and improvements.

-       Leads the creation of guidelines for post-mortem procedures to prevent incident reoccurrence.

-       Sets the standard for and determines service level agreements (SLAs) made with customers.

Innovation and Improvement:

-       Fosters a culture of creativity and innovation, advocating for research, experimentation, and implementation of tools and technologies to revolutionize infrastructure performance and reliability, anticipating and communicating implications of adherence to security standards on other integrations across Site Reliability Engineering.

-       Develops and leads strategic initiatives to address opportunities to improve performance bottlenecks and deployments, maximizing resource utilization, cost efficiency, speed, and scalability across the organization and leading roadmap development.

-       Refines standards for developing and maintaining knowledge in site reliability trends, encouraging the creation and sharing of insights and best practices to shape the future of building, testing, deploying, and running services.

-       Sets expectations for analyses and review, serving as an ultimate decision maker for current and future business development decisions (e.g., design changes).

Core Responsibilities

Planning & Execution:

-       Provides strategic oversight on the management and execution of large-scale projects or initiatives, monitoring timelines, deliverables, and budgets when applicable to ensure success. Sets strategies for appropriately delegating work, setting priorities, and aligning projects with business needs. Drives the strategic planning process across teams, providing guidance on resources or timelines in anticipation of changes.

Collaboration & Partnership:

-       Sets a strategic direction for collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment of expectations and strategic objectives. Drives a culture of teamwork, empowering teams to build and maintain partnerships with business leaders, stakeholders, and/or customers to contribute to organizational success. Promotes a culture of transparency and inclusivity where all voices are valued and respected.

Problem Solving:

-       Develops and implements strategies for specialized, advanced problem-solving efforts across the organization, serving as an escalation point for highly complex operational and/or technical issues. Oversees teams leveraging innovative techniques to address significant ambiguous issues, identify root causes, and prevent recurrence, reviewing solutions as needed.

Continuous Learning:

-       Champions continuous learning to maintain cutting-edge skills and influence organizational best practices. Inspires teams to build and maintain expertise in relevant areas by proactively monitoring emerging trends, technologies, and industry standards to help position the organization as an industry leader. Contributes to the organization’s strategy for learning and development, influencing leadership to foster learning opportunities for the team.

Continuous Improvement:

-       Drives a culture of continuous improvement that sets a standard for efficient and effective processes, protocols, and workflows across the organization. Oversees work to implement large-scale approaches and methods for continued improvement, ensuring changes align with organizational goals. Sets the strategic direction, prioritizes, and approves the roadmap of improvement initiatives to maximize return on investments.

Performance and Development:

-       Drives and ensures consistent application of performance management strategies, systems, processes, and guidelines across the organization. Creates an organizational culture of career development that encourages proactively identifying and pursuing career development opportunities and guiding leaders to support their team's growth. Drives consistency in the application of talent development procedures and socializes performance expectations across the organization. Partners with HR and executive leadership to envision and execute a talent management strategy, balancing budget and talent resources.