Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering

Company Description

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow— helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started.

Join us to put AI to work for people.

Job Description

Position overview 

ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering to build and lead a world-class SRE organization across our observability and control plane product portfolios. You will architect reliability programs that span internal platforms and commercial products, establishing SRE culture, practices, and tooling from the ground up. 

This is a program-building role. You will define SRE strategy, set operational standards, build teams (starting from scratch or scaling existing pockets), and drive measurable people and organizational transformation. You will report to the VP of Engineering and partner with product, platform, and infrastructure leaders across multiple business units. 

Key responsibilities 

Program building & strategy 

• Build an SRE program from the ground up—define charter, operating model, hiring strategy, and multi-year roadmap 

• Establish SRE principles, practices, and standards across observability products (OODP, metrics, alerting) and control plane offerings 

• Create unified reliability frameworks that work for both internal-facing and customer-facing systems 

• Design SRE on-call rotations, incident response processes, and blameless postmortem culture 

Team leadership & people transformation 

• Build and scale an SRE team from existing base across observability and control plane domains 

• Design hiring criteria and interview processes that attract high-caliber SREs with platform and reliability expertise 

• Create mentorship and career development paths; foster SRE culture and continuous learning 

• Drive organizational transformation: shift product and infrastructure teams toward reliability-first mindsets 

• Establish clear SRE career levels, expectations, and growth frameworks 

Reliability & operational excellence 

• Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for observability and control plane products; operationalize them 

• Build AI native toil reduction initiatives; automate repetitive operational work across SRE and product teams 

• Own incident management: design escalation policies, postmortem practices, and continuous improvement loops 

• Partner with platform/infrastructure teams to improve reliability infrastructure (CI/CD, deployment systems, monitoring) 

• Establish reliability metrics, dashboards, and reporting for leadership visibility 

Cross-functional alignment 

• Partner with product teams to embed SRE thinking in design and development of new features 

• Work with observability leadership on internal vs. commercial product strategy—tailor SRE programs accordingly 

• Collaborate with customer success and support on customer-facing reliability; define SLA/SLO communication 

• Partner with infrastructure and platform teams on shared services, runbooks, and operational tooling 

• Engage with security and compliance on reliability-related governance and risk 

Qualifications

Required qualifications 

• 12+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or reliability engineering at scale 

• 5+ years in leadership roles (director or principal engineer) managing SRE or reliability teams of 10+ engineers 

• Demonstrated track record building SRE programs from scratch or scaling immature programs—with measurable business impact 

• Strong evidence of driving people and organizational transformation; ability to shift culture from reactive to proactive reliability 

• Deep expertise in SRE practices: SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems, on-call design, toil reduction 

• Hands-on experience with observability platforms (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) 

• Experience operating both internal platforms and commercial products (SaaS) 

• Comfort with the messy reality of multi-team, multi-product environments—ability to establish standards and drive adoption 

Preferred qualifications 

• Experience with control plane architectures or platform-as-a-service systems 

• Background building SRE programs in hybrid or multi-cloud deployments 

• Track record of mentoring and developing other SRE/platform leaders 

• Familiarity with chaos engineering, reliability testing, or resilience frameworks 

• Open-source contribution or thought leadership in SRE community 

Core competencies 

Program building 

• Ability to define a charter, secure stakeholder buy-in, and execute a multi-year strategy from concept to maturity 

• Comfortable with ambiguity and building in greenfield environments 

People transformation 

• Proven ability to shift organizational mindsets—making reliability a shared responsibility, not just an SRE function 

• Strong coaching and mentorship instincts; creates environments where people grow 

• Excellent communication skills—able to articulate reliability concepts to engineers, product managers, and executives 

Technical depth 

• Hands-on SRE expertise; can code, debug, and architect solutions alongside the team 

• Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, and telemetry infrastructure 

• Familiarity with multiple deployment models, cloud platforms, and operational challenges 

Operational leadership 

• Data-driven decision making; comfortable with SLOs, metrics, and evidence-based practices 

• Cross-functional influencing; ability to drive change without direct authority 

• Bias toward action and iteration—comfort making decisions with incomplete information 

What we offer 

• Competitive salary and equity package 

• Comprehensive health, wellness, and retirement benefits 

• Unlimited PTO and flexible work arrangements 

• Leadership coaching and executive development 

• The opportunity to build a world-class SRE organization and shape reliability culture across critical product lines 

JV20

Additional Information

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity,  veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.  

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact globaltalentss@servicenow.com for assistance. 

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities. 

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