Site Reliability Engineering Manager

What this role is about: This is an engineering leadership role, not simply an on‑call manager. The SRE Manager owns two things: keeping Rapid

SOS’s cloud infrastructure running reliably, and helping product teams get to a place where they can run their own services without routing every operational issue through SRE. Rapid

SOS powers real‑time emergency response by connecting life‑critical data to first responders, so reliability here directly impacts outcomes in moments that matter.

You will lead the SRE Operations team and report to the Director of SRE & Platform Engineering. The team has real roots in NOC‑style operations, and the honest goal of this role is to move it toward something more engineering‑focused and proactive: better tooling, better practices, more ownership at the service team level. That’s a gradual transition, and you’ll be the one shaping how it happens.

• Own the reliability, scalability, and operational health of Rapid
  
  SOS Kubernetes clusters, shared services, and core AWS infrastructure; ensure upgrades, capacity planning, node scaling, and testing that multi‑region failover actually works.
• Drive the IaC foundation in Terraform/Atlantis and champion infrastructure‑as‑code as a core engineering standard.
• Partner with Engineering Managers to set SLOs for their services, establish error budgets, and help teams build the habits to operate what they ship; the goal is for product teams to own their services, not to have SRE own everything on their behalf.
• Maintain proactive reliability work: capacity planning, failure mode analysis, runbook quality, and chaos engineering exercises; run reliability reviews before major launches and organize failure mode exercises with product teams.
• Drive blameless postmortem practice, ensuring every significant incident produces systemic improvements with clear ownership and closure.
• Run the Tier 1 on‑call rotation: scheduling for primary and secondary engineers, coordination with the 3rd‑party NOC, and keeping incident escalation processes smooth and manageable.
• Lead incident command on Sev‑1s, escalating when needed, and keep engineering leadership informed throughout.
• Lead and grow a high‑impact team by mentoring engineers, owning headcount, and thinking ahead about what the team needs as the function grows.
• Shape the team’s long‑term AI strategy for infrastructure and operations by identifying opportunities for AI‑driven automation and insight generation, evaluating tooling and workflows, and operationalizing best practices for scalable team‑wide usage.
• Own reserved‑instance strategy and the team’s AWS cost footprint, error budgets and SLOs across production services and communicate that picture clearly to engineering and product leadership.
• Work alongside Platform SRE on bigger infrastructure projects:
  Gateway API adoption, cross‑region architecture, security changes.

• 7+ years in SRE, platform engineering, or Dev Ops, with at least two years where you were responsible for a team as a manager.
• You’ve been directly responsible for Kubernetes and AWS infrastructure in production environments where uptime and resilience are critical.
• Experience moving a team from reactive ops toward engineering‑first reliability practices.
• You’ve worked collaboratively with engineering teams to proactively improve reliability, scalability, and operational readiness before issues reach production.
• Ability to write Python, review production‑quality scripts, and tooling.
• You’ve applied SLOs, error budgets, and blameless postmortems in practice to improve reliability and drive better engineering decisions; hands‑on familiarity with Terraform/Atlantis, Kubernetes/Helm/ArgoCD, Datadog, Concourse CI/Git Hub Actions, Rabbit
  
  MQ, and AWS (EKS, RDS/Aurora, Elasti Cache, VPC networking, IAM, KMS, Route
  53).

• The chance to work with a passionate team on solving one of the largest challenges globally.
• Competitive salary and benefits and equity participation.
• A dynamic, flexible and fun start‑up work environment with a highly talented team.

Starting pay for a successful applicant will depend on a variety of job‑related factors, which may include experience, relevant skills, training, education, location, business needs, or market demands. The salary range for this role is $185,000 - $215,000. This role will also be eligible to receive equity options.

Rapid

SOS is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status.