Director, Site Reliability Engineer

ABOUT THIS POSITION

We are seeking an experienced and strategic Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to lead and scale our SRE organization, overseeing four SRE teams responsible for the reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence of our most critical platforms and services.

This role is both highly technical and deeply people‑focused, requiring strong cloud expertise (GCP preferred or equivalent), hands‑on SRE experience, and a proven ability to set vision, standards, and direction across Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Infrastructure‑as‑Code (IaC) automation.

As a senior leader, the Director of SRE will partner closely with Engineering, Product, Architecture, Infrastructure, and Security leadership to embed reliability, automation, and resilience into every layer of the technology stack while enabling teams to move faster and more safely.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Leadership & Strategy

• Provide strategic leadership and oversight for four SRE teams, setting clear direction, priorities, and expectations aligned to business and engineering objectives.
• Lead, mentor, and develop SRE managers and senior engineers, fostering a culture of accountability, operational ownership, innovation, and psychological safety.
• Define and own the SRE and Platform Engineering strategy and roadmap, ensuring alignment with cloud transformation initiatives and long‑term organizational goals.
• Serve as a key voice in architectural and platform decisions, influencing designs with a focus on scalability, reliability, automation, and operational efficiency.
• Partner with executive leadership to communicate reliability posture, risks, and investment needs in clear business terms.

Reliability & Platform Engineering

• Establish and continuously evolve SRE principles and best practices, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, toil management, and reliability‑driven prioritization.
• Provide technical direction and governance across GCP (preferred) and AWS environments, ensuring consistent reliability and operational patterns.
• Drive the evolution of Platform Engineering, enabling self‑service infrastructure and guard‑railed service delivery for application teams.
• Own strategy and standards for Infrastructure‑as‑Code (IaC) and automation, leveraging tools such as Terraform or equivalent frameworks across cloud environments.
• Ensure observability excellence through metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and proactive capacity and performance management.

Incident Management & Operational Resilience

• Provide executive leadership during large‑scale or high‑impact incidents, ensuring effective coordination, escalation, and stakeholder communication.
• Define, refine, and scale incident management and on‑call practices, emphasizing resilience, sustainability, and rapid recovery.
• Champion blameless postmortems, ensuring root causes are addressed and learnings are translated into systemic improvements.
• Partner with Security and Compliance teams to ensure systems meet security, privacy, and regulatory requirements without compromising reliability.

Operational Excellence & Measurement

• Own and report on reliability metrics, operational KPIs, and service health for leadership and executive stakeholders.
• Drive continuous improvement through reliability reviews, retrospectives, and data‑driven decision‑making.
• Balance reliability, velocity, and cost across platforms, applying error budgets and capacity planning to guide trade‑offs.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, infrastructure, platform, or systems engineering roles, with 5+ years leading managers and senior technical teams.
• Direct, hands‑on experience in Site Reliability Engineering, including operating production systems at scale.
• Strong experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or equivalent public cloud (AWS or Azure), including distributed, cloud‑native architectures.
• Proven expertise in Infrastructure‑as‑Code (IaC) and automation frameworks (e.g., Terraform or similar).
• Deep understanding of observability ecosystems (metrics, logging, tracing), CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps/SRE tooling.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, influencing at all levels of the organization.

AI & Innovation Mindset

• Leverage AI‑assisted tools and platforms to improve operational efficiency, incident response, reliability analysis, and engineering workflows.
• Champion experimentation and continuous learning, applying emerging technologies to modernize reliability and platform practices.
• Enable teams to responsibly adopt AI capabilities while maintaining reliability, security, and governance standards.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes, microservices architectures, and service meshes.
• Familiarity with chaos engineering, resilience testing, and failure injection methodologies.
• Background in performance engineering, capacity planning, or large‑scale platform migrations.
• Experience leading reliability or platform initiatives during major cloud or organizational transformations.

WAYSTAR PERKS

• Competitive total rewards (base salary + bonus, if applicable)
• Customizable benefits package (3 medical plans with Health Saving Account company match)
• We offer generous paid time off for our non-exempt team members, starting with 3 weeks + 13 paid holidays, including 2 personal floating holidays. We also offer flexible time off for our exempt team members + 13 paid holidays
• Paid parental leave (including maternity + paternity leave)
• Education assistance opportunities and free LinkedIn Learning access
• Free mental health and family planning programs, including adoption assistance and fertility support
• 401(K) program with company match
• Pet insurance
• Employee resource groups

Waystar is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We celebrate, value, and support diversity and inclusion. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, marital status, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

This applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.