Chief Cloud Operations Manager

Job Summary

As a seasoned Site Reliability Engineer II, you will be responsible for ensuring the availability, latency, performance, and efficiency of our SaaS application on Azure. This role requires strong leadership skills, technical expertise, and a focus on reliability engineering.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and Enforce Reliability Standards: Develop and maintain SLIs/SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services, align teams to them, and publish quarterly reviews.
• Error Budgeting and Management: Run error-budget policy with multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerts; clear runbooks and paging thresholds. Maintain SLO/EB dashboards (Azure Monitor, Grafana/Prometheus, App Insights). Lead weekly SLO reviews with engineering/product.
• Incident Response and Communication: Own comms during SEV1/SEV2 incidents, lead blameless postmortems, and make corrective actions stick.
• Reliability Engineering in AKS: Harden clusters (network, identity, policy), optimize node/pod density, ingress (AGIC/Nginx); mesh optional.
• Observability and Monitoring: Implement metrics/traces/logs with Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana; alert on symptoms, not noise.
• IaC and Automation: Terraform/Bicep modules, GitOps (Flux/Argo), policy-as-code (Azure Policy/OPA Gatekeeper). No snowflakes.
• CI/CD Reliability: Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions with canary/blue-green, progressive delivery, auto-rollback, Key Vault-backed secrets.
• Capacity and Performance: Load testing, right-sizing, autoscaling; partner with FinOps to reduce spend without hurting SLOs.
• DR You Can Trust: Define RTO/RPO, test backups/restore, run game days/chaos drills, validate ASR and multi-region failover.
• Secure by Default: Entra ID (Azure AD), managed identities, Key Vault rotation, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, shift-left checks in CI.
• Reduce Toil: Automate recurring ops, build self-service runbooks/chatops, publish golden paths for product teams.
• Customer Escalations: Be the technical owner on calls; communicate tradeoffs and recovery plans with authority.
• Document to Scale: Architectures, runbooks, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs—kept current and discoverable.
• PostgreSQL Expertise: Deep operational expertise including HA/DR, logical/physical replication, performance tuning (indexes/EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, pg_stat_statements), autovacuum strategy, partitioning, backup/restore testing, and connection pooling (pgBouncer).
• Azure Core Expertise: AKS (must-have); Front Door/App Gateway, API Management, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, Storage, Key Vault, Redis, Service Bus/Event Hubs.
• Observability Expertise: Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana; SLO design and error-budget operations.
• IaC/Automation Expertise: Terraform and/or Bicep; PowerShell and Python; GitOps (Flux/Argo). Pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Proven Incident Leadership: At scale, blameless postmortems, and SLO/error-budget governance with change gating.
• Mentorship and Communication: Strong mentorship and crisp written/verbal communication.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's in CS/Engineering (or equivalent experience).
• 12+ years in production ops/platform/SRE, including 5+ years on Azure.
• PostgreSQL: Deep operational expertise incl. HA/DR, logical/physical replication, performance tuning, autovacuum strategy, partitioning, backup/restore testing, and connection pooling.
• Azure core: AKS, Front Door/App Gateway, API Management, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, Storage, Key Vault, Redis, Service Bus/Event Hubs.
• Observability: Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana; SLO design and error-budget operations.
• IaC/automation: Terraform and/or Bicep; PowerShell and Python; GitOps (Flux/Argo). Pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Proven incident leadership at scale, blameless postmortems, and SLO/error-budget governance with change gating.
• Mentorship and crisp written/verbal communication.