About the role
To be considered for this position, applications and resumes are accepted only through our careers site by directly applying to the posted job. We do not accept unsolicited resumes or sales solicitations from staffing agencies. Any OCC employee wishing to submit a referral must do so through their Workday account. Any resume submitted outside of an active job posting will not be considered for employment.
What You'll Do:
Summary
2-3 sentences describing the overall responsibilities.
This is a people-management role with full supervisory responsibility for a team of engineers and managers. The Director will lead and manage this team to drive reliability, observability, and cloud platform engineering excellence across a large, complex cloud-based computing environment. The ideal candidate is a hands-on, data-driven technical leader, who can personally raise the bar on SRE and observability practices, reduce waste, optimize cloud efficiency, and improve performance, in close partnership with a dedicated SRE/monitoring team and a centralized architecture function. This individual will also serve as a player-coach, passionate about new technologies, mentoring technical teams through complex initiatives while keeping a steady eye on the extensive regulatory/compliance demands on our company (e.g., CIS, NIST).
Primary Duties and Responsibilities
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.
Reports to the Executive Director of Platform Engineering
Management Responsibilities:
Manage and develop a team of engineers and managers focused on SRE, observability, and cloud platform engineering, growing and retaining talent
Lead hiring and staffing for the team, including sourcing, interviewing, and selecting engineers and managers to build out the organization
Meet with team members regularly to provide coaching and feedback on performance
Perform evaluations and deal effectively with staff problems and corrective actions as needed
Develop employee career development plans to assist with team member career growth and development
Manage and participate in the implementation of production changes during defined maintenance windows and support on-call rotation
Serve as a point of escalation within the team for reliability, observability, and platform support issues
Foster an atmosphere of trust, respect, and high performance while displaying strong ethics and integrity
Manage project and daily work task planning and prioritization, meeting project deadlines while maintaining a high quality of work
Ensure team compliance with all appropriate OCC policies and procedures, and institute corrective actions to address audit and other regulatory or compliance findings
Operate within budget; establish and assure adherence to schedules, work plans, and performance requirements
Technical & Platform Responsibilities:
Bring deep, hands-on SRE and observability expertise to Platform Engineering, elevating the maturity, rigor, and technical depth of the organization’s observability, monitoring, and reliability practices in close partnership with the dedicated SRE and monitoring team
Serve as a technical authority on reliability engineering, mentoring engineers and managers and raising the bar on SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, and postmortem discipline across the platform organization
Own the definition, governance, and lifecycle of SLOs and SLAs across Platform Engineering, codified as SLO-as-code (e.g., OpenSLO, Sloth, or Nobl9) and version-controlled in the repo rather than only living in a vendor UI
Drive resilience engineering as a discipline across the platform, including chaos engineering (e.g., AWS FIS, Gremlin) and load/performance testing, to proactively validate and improve system resilience ahead of production incidents
Deliver golden paths and templates (Terraform modules, Helm charts, pipeline templates) that ship with logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerts, and SLO defaults out of the box, reducing toil and accelerating safe onboarding for engineering teams
Act as product owner for observability within the platform organization, defining the roadmap and requirements for observability capabilities while the dedicated SRE and monitoring team retains ownership of the underlying tooling and operations
Own and drive platform engineering delivery and reliability metrics, including DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, MTTR), cycle time, and throughput, holding the organization accountable to continuous improvement
Define and report on a rounded set of platform and observability metrics: platform adoption (percentage of services on paved roads, service catalog completeness, time to first deploy, onboarding time), observability coverage (percentage of tier-1 services with SLOs, instrumented traces, and runbooks), observability health (MTTD, MTTA, alert actionability ratio, toil percentage, and paging load per engineer), observability economics (telemetry cost per service, cardinality and ingestion growth, and retention tiers), and developer experience (SPACE/DevEx measures alongside DORA)
Champion the Golden Signals, RED, and USE methods as the platform’s common language for monitoring and alerting
Ensure audit-grade telemetry practices, including log retention and immutability, PII and sensitive-data scrubbing, and access controls on observability data, mapped to relevant compliance frameworks (e.g., CIS, NIST, and SIFMU-specific resilience and reporting expectations)
Drive reliability across four core pillars: a data-driven culture (“data junkies”) that uses telemetry and metrics, not intuition, to make decisions; waste reduction through elimination of toil and inefficient processes; cloud measures such as utilization, rightsizing, and FinOps metrics; and continuous performance optimization
Translate reliability signals (SLOs, error budgets, incident learnings) surfaced by the SRE organization into concrete cloud platform investments and roadmap priorities
Drive results in the cloud platform by building a reliable, scalable, secure technology stack in collaboration with engineers and leaders, using leading industry practices
Champion infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices across the cloud platform, ensuring provisioning, configuration, and environment management are automated, version-controlled, and consistently applied
Assess and plan for capacity needs within the cloud platform and forecast accordingly
Collaborate with the centralized architecture function on platform architecture decisions, ensuring cloud platform engineering execution aligns with broader architectural standards and direction
Implement and manage initiatives within your assigned area of responsibility with accountability for results and compliance with all controls and security requirements
Lead in the development of technology roadmaps and end-of-life technology plans
Effectively communicate project and operational service issues to senior management promptly with observations, decisions, and recommendations for corrective measures
Other duties as assigned
Supervisory Responsibilities
Manage a team of engineers and engineering managers focused on SRE, observability, and cloud platform engineering. Full people-management responsibilities, including hiring, performance management, coaching, career development, and corrective action.
Qualifications
The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.
[Required] 5+ years of demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, with an emphasis on developing key talent and cultivating positive, high-performing cultures
[Required] 10+ years of progressive, hands-on experience in software engineering with an understanding of large-scale