VP, Reliability and Automation Engineering Manager

Role Summary/Purpose

The VP, Reliability and Automation Engineering Manager leads the Reliability Engineering function responsible for keeping all applications within the Digital Servicing Engineering domain stable, observable, and operationally efficient. This role defines how reliability engineering is practiced across teams – setting standards for service health, monitoring/alerting, incident response, problem management and operational readiness – while directly managing and developing a team of reliability engineers who execute those practices day to day.

This role requires strong people leadership plus deep hands‑on expertise in reliability engineering, architecture, CI/CD, incident management and operational excellence. The manager leads by example, influences cross‑functional engineering and product teams, and establishes repeatable engineering practices that reduce operational toil, improve system availability and accelerate safe delivery.

• Ensure effective 24x7 operational coverage and on‑call practices, including staff readiness, rotations, and escalation paths.
• Oversee production defect analysis, troubleshooting, and resolution; ensure fixes are implemented and validated to prevent recurrence.
• Use structured problem‑solving to assess impact, mitigation options, and resolution timelines during service events.
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Reliability Engineers; set clear goals, performance expectations, and career development plans.
• Build and maintain staffing plans, hiring strategy, onboarding approach, and succession planning for reliability and automation capabilities.
• Create a culture of operational ownership, blameless learning, high engineering standards, and continuous improvement.
• Define and drive reliability engineering strategy across Digital Servicing Engineering, including client SLAs, reliability goals, operational KPIs, and service health practices.
• Establish and govern practices for incident response, escalation, problem management, and root cause analysis (RCA), ensuring measurable reduction in repeat incidents.
• Partner with engineering, architecture, security, and product teams to embed reliability requirements into design, delivery, and release processes.
• Drive an automation‑first roadmap to reduce manual operational work (toil), improve deployment safety, and increase operational consistency.
• Standardize and improve reliability engineering patterns, including monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and operational readiness criteria.
• Provide technical oversight and direction across the full stack, aligning reliability engineering with modern architecture practices.
• Ensure compliance with Synchrony architecture, security, and technology standards.
• Contribute to future‑state technology strategy, modernization, migration roadmaps, and production support readiness.
• Collaborate with software engineers, product managers, architects, and customer application experts to deliver resilient customer communications applications.
• Partner with third‑party vendors as needed to integrate software into Synchrony products while maintaining reliability and operational standards.
• Perform other duties and/or special projects as assigned.

• Bachelor’s degree and a minimum 6 years of experience with solution architecture.
• Minimum of 10 years of application development experience.
• Ability and flexibility to travel for business as required.

• Experience defining and managing SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, operational readiness reviews, and reliability KPIs.
• Strong background in automation‑first operations.
• Experience establishing standards for monitoring/alerts quality.
• Deep expertise with production telemetry and tooling like Splunk and New Relic.
• Experience implementing log/metric/trace practices and dashboards that support fast triage and service recovery.
• Strong understanding of modern application architecture and runtime environments such as PCF, AWS, microservices, REST APIs, React
  
  JS applications, iOS/Android native applications.
• Ability to influence design decisions to improve reliability, scalability and supportability.
• Experience delivering…