Sr Director, Payments SRE

Role overview

Set the strategy and lead the reliability engineering function supporting high-volume, low-latency payment platforms. You will guide managers and technical teams across multiple domains, improving observability, incident response, automation, performance, and capacity while embedding reliability practices throughout engineering and product delivery.

Responsibilities

- Define organization-wide reliability strategy covering observability, automation, incident and problem management, and performance. - Grow and lead SRE teams across payment domains, including managers and senior individual contributors. - Guide solutions to complex reliability challenges in highly available, low-latency systems where transaction integrity matters. - Establish business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance practices for the platform. - Advise engineering, product, and platform leaders on architecture and reliability priorities; represent SRE in executive planning and reviews. - Set hiring and workforce plans, mentor leaders, and promote blameless incident response and continuous improvement.

Requirements

- 15 years of software engineering experience, including 7 years managing engineering teams of managers and individual contributors. - Deep experience with cloud-native architecture, distributed systems, system design, automation, and performance optimization. - Knowledge of Kubernetes, service meshes, distributed tracing, container orchestration, monitoring and logging platforms, databases, networking, and storage. - Track record with high-availability, low-latency workloads and transactional integrity. - Strong incident command, crisis management, regulatory compliance, and reliability improvement experience. - Leadership skills for distributed teams, cross-functional stakeholders, and psychologically safe, high-stakes environments.

Nice to have

- Experience with payment security, PCI-DSS, payment-flow monitoring, gateway integrations, transaction recovery and idempotency, or reconciliation schedules. - Applied AI or machine learning for anomaly detection, predictive observability, or operations. - Cloud cost optimization experience and the ability to connect SRE priorities to business goals. - Experience establishing SLOs and incident communication practices across multiple product lines; publications or conference talks in SRE.

Benefits and work setup

- Published base pay range: $210,000–$249,500. Actual pay depends on qualifications and other factors; compensation may also include a role-based bonus. - Benefits include health, dental, and vision coverage; retirement savings; paid time off; HSA and FSA options; life and disability insurance; and tuition reimbursement.