Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering

About the role

Company Description It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow— helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started. Join us to put AI to work for people.   Job Description Position overview  ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering to build and lead a world-class SRE organization across our observability and control plane product portfolios. You will architect reliability programs that span internal platforms and commercial products, establishing SRE culture, practices, and tooling from the ground up.  This is a program-building role. You will define SRE strategy, set operational standards, build teams (starting from scratch or scaling existing pockets), and drive measurable people and organizational transformation. You will report to the VP of Engineering and partner with product, platform, and infrastructure leaders across multiple business units.  Key responsibilities  Program building & strategy  Build an SRE program from the ground up—define charter, operating model, hiring strategy, and multi-year roadmap  Establish SRE principles, practices, and standards across observability products (OODP, metrics, alerting) and control plane offerings  Create unified reliability frameworks that work for both internal-facing and customer-facing systems  Design SRE on-call rotations, incident response processes, and blameless postmortem culture  Team leadership & people transformation   Build and scale an SRE team from existing base across observability and control plane domains  Design hiring criteria and interview processes that attract high-caliber SREs with platform and reliability expertise  Create mentorship and career development paths; foster SRE culture and continuous learning  Drive organizational transformation: shift product and infrastructure teams toward reliability-first mindsets  Establish clear SRE career levels, expectations, and growth frameworks  Reliability & operational excellence  Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for observability and control plane products; operationalize them  Build AI native toil reduction initiatives; automate repetitive operational work across SRE and product teams  Own incident management: design escalation policies, postmortem practices, and continuous improvement loops  Partner with platform/infrastructure teams to improve reliability infrastructure (CI/CD, deployment systems, monitoring)  Establish reliability metrics, dashboards, and reporting for leadership visibility  Cross-functional alignment  Partner with product teams to embed SRE thinking in design and development of new features  Work with observability leadership on internal vs. commercial product strategy—tailor SRE programs accordingly  Collaborate with customer success and support on customer-facing reliability; define SLA/SLO communication  Partner with infrastructure and platform teams on shared services, runbooks, and operational tooling  Engage with security and compliance on reliability-related governance and risk  Qualifications Required qualifications  12+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, or reliability engineering at scale  5+ years in leadership roles (director or principal engineer) managing SRE or reliability teams of 10+ engineers  Demonstrated track record building SRE programs from scratch or scaling immature programs—with measurable business impact  Strong evidence of driving people and organizational transformation; ability to shift culture from reactive to proactive reliability  Deep expertise in SRE practices: SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems, on-call design, toil reduction  Hands-on experience with observability platforms (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting)  Experience operating both internal platforms and commercial products (SaaS)  Comfort with the messy reality of multi-team, multi-product environments—ability to establish standards and drive adoption  Preferred qualifications  Experience with control plane architectures or platform-as-a-service systems  Background building SRE programs in hybrid or multi-cloud deployments  Track record of mentoring and developing other SRE/platform leaders  Familiarity with chaos engineering, reliability testing, or resilience frameworks  Open-source contribution or thought leadership in SRE community  Core competencies  Program building  Ability to define a charter, secure stakeholder buy-in, and execute a multi-year strategy from concept to maturity  Comfortable with ambiguity and building in greenfield environments  People transformation  Proven ability to shift organizational mindsets—making reliability a shared responsibility, not just an SRE function  Strong coaching and mentorship instincts; creates environments where people grow  Excellent communication skills—able to articulate reliability concepts to engineers, product managers, and executives  Technical depth  Hands-on SRE expertise; can code, debug, and architect solutions alongside the team  Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, and telemetry infrastructure  Familiarity with multiple deployment models, cloud platforms, and operational challenges  Operational leadership  Data-driven decision making; comfortable with SLOs, metrics, and evidence-based practices  Cross-functional influencing; ability to drive change without direct authority  Bias toward action and iteration—comfort making decisions with incomplete information  What we offer  Competitive salary and equity package  Comprehensive health, wellness, and retirement benefits  Unlimited PTO and flexible work arrangements  Leadership coaching and executive development  The opportunity to build a world-class SRE organization and shape reliability culture across critical product lines    JV20 Additional Information Work Personas We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here . To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service. Equal Opportunity Employer ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity,  veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.   Accommodations We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact globaltalentss@servicenow.com for assistance.  Export Control Regulations For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities.  From Fortune. ©2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All rights reserved. Used under license.