Sr. Manager - SRE

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

We’re seeking a Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineer to join our team and help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of Backblaze production systems.

We are seeking an experienced Senior Manager to lead within our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization. The ideal candidate brings deep experience developing engineering strategies, leading high-performing technical teams, and translating reliability priorities into measurable outcomes.

As a leader at Backblaze, you will work across the organization to help achieve our reliability and operational goals, including partnering with engineering leaders, executives, customers, and other key stakeholders. This role will focus on unlocking the potential of our engineers through observability, automation, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

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  Hire, lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers, including coaching, career development, and performance management.

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  Manage other engineering managers as required and help develop leadership capability within the organization.

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  Establish team goals, objectives, and reliability priorities, ensuring commitments are delivered or expectations are proactively reset when circumstances change.

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  Collaborate with engineering leaders across Backblaze to define strategic priorities and execution plans.

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  Develop and improve automation that accelerates the deployment of new storage vaults, core servers, and supporting infrastructure.

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  Own and improve vulnerability management and patching schedules to ensure contractual, operational, and security requirements are met.

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  Drive complex reliability initiatives from problem discovery through implementation and resolution.

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  Partner with engineering teams to improve observability, monitoring, and alerting and provide meaningful insight into the health and performance of Backblaze infrastructure.

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  Lead analysis of SLA and reliability performance, identify areas of risk, and drive corrective actions.

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  Participate in leadership on-call rotations, major incident response, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve service reliability.

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  Provide leadership during incidents and ensure root cause analyses, corrective actions, and follow-up work are completed effectively.

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  Apply established ITIL and operational processes across incident, change, problem, and capacity management.

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  Partner with Engineering, Customer Success, Product, and Operations teams to support resilient system design and reliable production operations.

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  Engage with customers to understand their reliability needs and ensure stability priorities reflect customer experiences and business requirements.

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  Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and monitor SLA performance.

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  Lead cross-functional initiatives to identify gaps in observability, operational processes, reliability, and infrastructure management.

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  Identify recurring operational issues and develop long-term strategies and action plans to address them.

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  Document systems, share learnings, and promote a reliability-focused engineering culture across Backblaze.

• 10+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, infrastructure, or production operations, including significant engineering leadership experience.

• Demonstrated experience building, managing, mentoring, and developing high-performing technical teams.

• Experience leading reliability or infrastructure organizations operating large-scale, production-grade systems.

• Strong understanding of deploying and managing large fleets of Linux hosts, with a strong emphasis on automation.

• Strong knowledge of observability and monitoring technologies such as VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch, or comparable platforms.

• Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, incident processes, and reliability practices at scale.

• Strong understanding of storage systems, including storage performance, sharding, distributed architectures, and storage algorithms.

• Understanding of load-balancing technologies and services, including IPVS or comparable technologies.

• Experience managing security-focused infrastructure operations, including patching, hardening, vulnerability identification, and remediation.

• Demonstrated ability to lead major incidents and post-incident processes, including root cause analysis and corrective action planning.

• Experience using automation and AI-assisted technologies to improve engineering productivity, system performance, operational efficiency, or scalability.

• Ability to independently take ownership of complex problems and drive initiatives from discovery through resolution.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with engineers, executives, customers, vendors, and cross-functional stakeholders.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience operating infrastructure at hyperscale or within a hyperscaler environment.

• Experience in SaaS, cloud infrastructure, service provider, storage, or large-scale distributed systems environments.

• Experience with object storage or other large-scale storage platforms.

• Familiarity with ITIL or OSS operational practices.

• Experience defining, managing, and improving SLOs and SLAs.

• Experience with AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or other major cloud platforms.

• Experience leading teams through significant infrastructure scaling, reliability, or operational transformation initiatives.