Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Reliability leadership is becoming a differentiator across SaaS, particularly for products operating at global scale where uptime and performance translate directly into retention and trust. This Lead Site Reliability Engineer role sits at that intersection, with explicit ownership of Service Level Objectives and a mandate to shape resilient, automated production systems in cloud and hybrid environments. The emphasis on reducing toil through automation reflects a mature approach to operating subscription software.
From a SaaS career perspective, the scope maps to the core operating model of modern platforms: observability, incident response, and reliability engineering embedded into the software lifecycle. Experience driving postmortems, tuning on call sustainability, and influencing architectural decisions builds a portfolio that transfers across B2B SaaS companies with multi tenant services and strict availability expectations. The combination of coding, infrastructure as code, and performance optimisation also supports progression toward broader platform engineering or engineering leadership tracks.
This role fits an SRE who enjoys setting standards, coaching others, and partnering across engineering rather than functioning as a ticket based operations layer. It is well aligned for someone comfortable balancing hands on technical depth with prioritisation, stakeholder influence, and the accountability that comes with being responsible for production outcomes.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Role:
Glean is seeking a Site Reliability Engineering Lead to foster a culture of engineering excellence, drive technical strategy, and develop a high-performing, collaborative team. Your role is pivotal in ensuring our services meet stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and in building resilient, automated production environments in the cloud. You'll lead a team and be responsible for products globally, providing technical leadership to key projects and empowering your team to do the same.
Much of our software development focuses on building infrastructure to scale our operations in a hybrid cloud environment and eliminating work through automation. On the SRE team, you’ll have the opportunity to manage the complex challenges of scale and fast growth which are unique to Glean, while using your expertise in coding, algorithms, problem-solving, and SRE practices. We keep Glean applications up and running, ensuring our customers have the best and most reliable experience possible.
You are:
- Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Play a key role in driving technical excellence and fostering a culture of reliability across engineering teams. You will lead by example, setting best practices for incident management, performance optimization, and automation. Influence best practices, drive cross-team collaborations, and contribute to the execution of key objectives in alignment with engineering leadership and cross-functional partners. Establish strong technical credibility, shaping architectural decisions and ensuring the delivery of high-quality, reliable systems.
- Ensure High Availability: Implement and maintain resilient cloud architectures, monitor system performance, and proactively identify and resolve potential bottlenecks or points of failure.
- Incident Management: Participate in primary oncall rotation; cultivate technical curiosity and growth mindset, and a blameless postmortem culture within the team. Continuously optimize the on-call process for sustainability and efficiency.
- Automation and Tooling: Develop and maintain automation scripts, tools, and processes to streamline system deployment, monitoring, and management tasks. Your contributions will be vital in efficiently scaling cloud operations.
- Performance Optimization: Optimize cloud infrastructure and applications for performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
- Security and Compliance: Collaborate with security engineers to implement best practices and ensure compliance with security standards and policies.
- Monitoring and Alerting: Design and configure advanced monitoring systems to gain insights into system behavior, set up alerts, and respond proactively to potential issues. Create and maintain comprehensive dashboards and playbooks for production on-call.
- Software Development Consultation: Engage actively in the entire software development lifecycle. Participate in system design reviews and provide valuable SRE insights during launch reviews, influencing and enhancing system architecture.
About you:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of experience in a senior-level role within Site Reliability Engineering or similar role, particularly in managing cloud-based services and infrastructure.
- 5+ years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages.
- 3+ years of experience managing people or teams, leading projects, and designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems running in Cloud.
- Strong knowledge of cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure.
- Practical experience with containerization technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes. Familiarity with infrastructure as code tools like Terraform is essential.
- Solid understanding of networking, security principles, and best SRE and security practices.
- Proficiency in using monitoring and alerting tools to detect and respond to potential issues effectively
Location:
- This role is hybrid (4 days a week in our Mountain View Office)
Compensation & Benefits:
The standard base salary range for this position is $200,000 - $260,000 annually. Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for variable compensation, equity, and benefits.
We offer a comprehensive benefits package including competitive compensation, Medical, Vision, and Dental coverage, generous time-off policy, and the opportunity to contribute to your 401k plan to support your long-term goals. When you join, you'll receive a home office improvement stipend, as well as an annual education and wellness stipends to support your growth and wellbeing. We foster a vibrant company culture through regular events, and provide healthy lunches daily to keep you fueled and focused.
We are a diverse bunch of people and we want to continue to attract and retain a diverse range of people into our organization. We're committed to an inclusive and diverse company. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.
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