Director of Cloud Platform Engineering; SRE & Observability Job Chicago area,Illinois USA,IT/Tech

Position: Director of Cloud Platform Engineering (SRE & Observability)

Director of Cloud Platform Engineering (SRE & Observability)

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.
o Reports to the Executive Director of Platform Engineering

Management Responsibilities:

o Manage and develop a team of engineers and managers focused on SRE, observability, and cloud platform engineering, growing and retaining talent
o Lead hiring and staffing for the team, including sourcing, interviewing, and selecting engineers and managers to build out the organization
o Meet with team members regularly to provide coaching and feedback on performance
o Perform evaluations and deal effectively with staff problems and corrective actions as needed
o Develop employee career development plans to assist with team member career growth and development
o Manage and participate in the implementation of production changes during defined maintenance windows and support on‑call rotation
o Serve as a point of escalation within the team for reliability, observability, and platform support issues
o Foster an atmosphere of trust, respect, and high performance while displaying strong ethics and integrity
o Manage project and daily work task planning and prioritization, meeting project deadlines while maintaining a high quality of work
o Ensure team compliance with all appropriate OCC policies and procedures, and institute corrective actions to address audit and other regulatory or compliance findings
o Operate within budget; establish and assure adherence to schedules, work plans, and performance requirements

Technical & Platform Responsibilities:

o 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
o 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
o 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
o 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
o 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
o Act as product owner for observability within the platform…