Lead, Site Reliability Engineer

Site Reliability Engineer

Become an everyday champion — and build a career where your impact fuels financial progress.

Card Works Financial Group is a diversified financial services platform building ethical solutions across credit, lending, and the full customer lifecycle. Through our family of companies, Card Works Financial Group tackles the complex challenges that larger financial institutions leave behind. We're embedded throughout the credit card ecosystem as a lender, servicer, and merchant acquirer.

With nearly 40 years of operating history, our track record is solid: disciplined in downturns and built to accelerate in recovery. The Card Works Financial Group companies take precise approach in complex markets, as a top three non-prime focused general purpose card issuer and a top fifteen U.S. merchant acquirer.

Our team tackles the industry's most complex credit and payment challenges. And we believe that excellent work starts with a team that feels supported, respected, and empowered to grow.

Essential Functions:

• Establish the SRE operating model (service onboarding, engagement model, governance, reliability reviews, production readiness standards, and quarterly planning) and ensure it is adopted across teams.
• Identify, pilot, and operationalize AI-enabled reliability use cases (e.g., alert noise reduction, incident summarization, correlation/root-cause hypothesis generation, runbook assistance, and auto-remediation with human approval) with appropriate guardrails.
• Define, implement, and operationalize reliability metrics by establishing and managing SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets to quantify and continuously improve service reliability, supporting engineering and business decisions.
• Own the centralized SRE service engagement model by defining service tiers, onboarding criteria, reliability standards, and a transparent intake/prioritization process aligned to business criticality.
• Define and enforce error budget policies (including escalation paths and release risk decisions) in partnership with Product/Engineering, using SLO attainment to guide trade-offs between feature velocity and reliability
• Establish and maintain centralized "paved road" reliability standards and assets (instrumentation conventions, golden signals, alerting standards, runbook templates, SLO dashboards) that product teams can adopt with minimal friction.
• Design the on-call and escalation model for a centralized SRE team (e.g., SRE overlay for major incidents, defined handoffs with service owners, and clear ownership boundaries) to improve response quality without creating single-team dependency.
• Design and engineer automation and observability solutions by developing tooling, dashboards, and systems to reduce operational toil (measure, report, and drive toil down over time), enhance system visibility, and accelerate delivery.
• Participates in incident and problem management by serving as incident coordinator for high-severity events, driving cross-functional responses, conducting blameless root cause analysis, running post-incident reviews (postmortems) with clear owners and due dates, ensuring remedial actions drive reliability improvements.
• Oversee operational readiness and performance by managing capacity planning, validating disaster recovery, conducting production readiness reviews, and ensuring systems meet availability, scalability, and recovery expectations.
• Partner with security, risk, and compliance teams to align reliability goals with governance and compliance requirements, ensuring secure, auditable, and well-documented practices.
• Collaborate across the organization by working closely with end users, product management, development, architecture, and IT Operational teams to embed reliability principles throughout the software development lifecycle, including service onboarding, reliability reviews, and shared SLO ownership.
• Champion reliability as a core product feature by promoting reliability throughout all phases of development, advocating for continuous improvement, and communicating key metrics and potential customer impact to stakeholders.
• Train, mentor, and upskill engineering teams by coaching engineers in SRE practices, supporting junior team members, and fostering a culture of shared ownership and accountability for reliability, including influencing teams without direct authority through standards, data, and executive-aligned priorities. Remain current on the latest SRE trends and best practices, including observability, AI-enabled operations (AIOps), and SLO management, and implement these methodologies to effectively support desired business outcomes.
  
  Evaluate AI tools for reliability with security/privacy/compliance guardrails (e.g., data handling, prompt/content controls, auditability) and measure impact.
• Participate in on-call rotations and operational support for SRE-supported systems and products.

Summary of

Qualifications:

• Experience in Site Reliability Engineering with a track record of delivering measurable…