Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager
M&T Bank · Buffalo · $139,700–$232,900 (stated in the posting)
Overview
The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager leads teams responsible for the reliability, availability, performance, and operational excellence of critical business applications and platforms. This role combines engineering leadership with deep expertise in production operations, observability, automation, incident management, and cloud technologies.
The SRE Manager partners with Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Business stakeholders to ensure systems are resilient, scalable, secure, and supportable. The role is accountable for driving operational excellence through automation, reliability engineering practices, and continuous improvement while developing high-performing SRE and Production Support teams.
Primary Responsibilities
Reliability & Operational Excellence
- Define and execute SRE strategies that improve system reliability, availability, scalability, and performance.
- Establish and govern Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and operational health metrics.
- Lead production readiness reviews, disaster recovery testing, resilience assessments, and operational risk mitigation activities.
- Drive continuous improvement of application stability, service availability, and customer experience.
Incident & Problem Management
- Lead major incident response and escalation management for critical production issues.
- Oversee root cause analysis (RCA) processes and ensure corrective actions are implemented and tracked to completion.
- Drive reduction of recurring incidents through engineering improvements, automation, and proactive monitoring.
- Provide executive-level communication during significant incidents and service disruptions.
Observability & Automation
- Establish monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, and observability standards across supported platforms.
- Lead implementation of dashboards and operational metrics that provide visibility into service health and customer impact.
- Drive automation initiatives that reduce manual operational effort, improve recovery times, and increase engineering efficiency.
- Promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD integration, automated remediation, and self-service operational capabilities.
Cloud & Platform Reliability
- Partner with Engineering and Infrastructure teams to support cloud-native and hybrid application environments.
- Ensure applications are designed and operated using resilient, scalable, and supportable architectures.
- Support modernization initiatives involving Azure cloud services, containers, APIs, microservices, and platform engineering practices.
- Evaluate vendor platforms and third-party services to ensure reliability and operational readiness.
AI & Modern Operations
- Drive adoption of AI and Generative AI capabilities to improve incident response, troubleshooting, observability, and operational efficiency.
- Identify opportunities for intelligent automation, anomaly detection, automated diagnostics, and AI-assisted knowledge management.
- Promote responsible AI adoption aligned with enterprise security, governance, and risk standards.
People Leadership
- Recruit, develop, coach, and retain high-performing Site Reliability Engineers, Production Engineers, Automation Engineers, and Observability Engineers.
- Establish career paths, skill development plans, and succession strategies.
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.
- Manage staffing, performance management, compensation recommendations, and organizational development activities.
Risk & Governance
- Ensure adherence to enterprise risk, cybersecurity, regulatory, and operational control standards.
- Identify and escalate operational risks impacting critical services or customer experiences.
- Support audits, regulatory reviews, disaster recovery exercises, and operational governance programs.
Scope of Responsibilities
Leads teams responsible for:
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Production Support
- Observability Engineering
- Incident Management
- Operational Automation
- Cloud Reliability
- Platform Operations
Responsible for reliability and operational health across multiple applications, platforms, cloud services, and vendor-supported solutions.
Supervisory Responsibilities
Typically manages 10-20 direct and indirect reports including SRE Engineers, Production Engineers, Technical Leads, and Engineering Managers.
Education & Experience Required
- 10+ years of technology experience with application support, infrastructure, cloud, software engineering, or reliability engineering responsibilities.
- 5+ years of leadership experience managing engineering, operations, or SRE teams.
- Experience managing production systems supporting critical business functions.
- Strong knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering principles, including SLOs, observability, automation, incident management, and operational excellence.
- Experience leading major incident response, root cause analysis, and service restoration efforts.
- Experience with cloud platforms, distributed systems, APIs, and modern application architectures.
- Strong communication, analytical, decision-making, and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related field.
- Experience leading SRE or Production Engineering organizations.
- Experience with Azure cloud technologies and cloud-native architectures.
- Experience with observability platforms such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Datadog, Grafana, Azure Monitor, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience with scripting and automation technologies including PowerShell, Python, Bash, and APIs.
- Experience with CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, DevOps, and Platform Engineering practices.
- Experience implementing operational AI use cases including incident analysis, observability analytics, and automated diagnostics.
- Financial services or other highly regulated industry experience preferred.
What Great Looks Like
A successful SRE Manager at M&T:
- Delivers highly available and resilient customer-facing platforms.
- Uses automation to eliminate operational toil and improve efficiency.
- Reduces mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to restore (MTTR).
- Establishes strong observability and operational intelligence capabilities.
- Builds a culture of reliability, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Successfully integrates AI-assisted operations and automation into support workflows.
- develops high-performing teams that balance reliability, speed, risk management, and customer experience.