Reliability Manager

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Reliability Manager to lead production reliability, incident response, service recovery, and continuous improvement for our SaaS product. This individual will be responsible for ensuring service availability, coordinating technical teams during production incidents, and developing effective monitoring and alerting solutions.

The ideal candidate has hands-on experience with production operations, incident management, and service reliability. Experience with Jira, Datadog, and Azure monitoring tools is highly desirable. The candidate should be able to learn our product, understand its operational behavior, and help build a proactive monitoring and alerting strategy that minimizes downtime and improves customer experience.

This is an operational leadership role focused on production reliability and incident management. It is not a traditional help desk, software development management, project management, or infrastructure management position.

Key Responsibilities

Incident Response & Service Recovery: Lead major incident response activities, coordinate technical teams, manage escalations, and drive timely service restoration during production outages.

Monitoring & Alerting: Design, implement, and continuously improve monitoring dashboards, alerts, thresholds, and notification workflows using tools such as Datadog, Azure Monitor, and Jira.

Production Reliability: Monitor SaaS application health, service availability, performance, and operational risks to proactively identify and resolve potential issues.

Root Cause Analysis: Lead post-incident reviews, document root causes, identify contributing factors, and track corrective and preventive actions to completion.

Customer Communication: Participate in customer-facing incident review meetings to explain outages, business impact, recovery efforts, lessons learned, and mitigation plans.

Support Rotation Management: Help establish and improve an on-call support rotation that enables internal IT teams to support customer-facing services during outages. This is an escalation and production support function, not a help desk role.

Operational Processes: Develop and maintain incident response workflows, escalation procedures, runbooks, recovery plans, and incident communication protocols.

Continuous Improvement: Analyze incident trends, recurring issues, service-level metrics, and alert effectiveness to reduce downtime and prevent repeat incidents.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with software engineering, infrastructure, cloud operations, IT, and customer support teams to improve end-to-end service reliability.

Reliability Reporting: Track and report key operational metrics, including incident frequency, time to detect, time to restore service, service availability, and recurring incident trends.

Required Qualifications

Proven experience in production operations, site reliability, service reliability, incident management, or SaaS application support.

Strong understanding of incident response, service recovery, escalation management, and major incident workflows.

Experience coordinating technical teams during production outages and driving issues through resolution.

Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving skills across application and cloud environments.

Experience conducting root cause analysis and leading post-incident reviews.

Ability to develop and improve monitoring, alerting, escalation, and operational support processes.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical incidents and corrective actions to customers and business stakeholders.

Experience developing or managing on-call rotations and production escalation procedures.

Ability to learn a complex product and understand its dependencies, failure scenarios, and operational requirements.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Datadog for application monitoring, dashboards, alerting, and observability.

Experience with Microsoft Azure monitoring tools, including Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

Experience with Jira for incident tracking, workflow management, escalation, and corrective action tracking.

Familiarity with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and IT service management (ITSM) practices.

Understanding of service-level agreements (SLAs), service-level indicators (SLIs), and service-level objectives (SLOs).

Experience supporting customer-facing SaaS platforms in a production

environment.

Familiarity with incident management frameworks, postmortem documentation, and operational readiness practices.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a hands-on reliability and operations leader who takes ownership of production incidents from detection through recovery and follow-up. They can coordinate multiple technical teams under pressure, communicate clearly with customers during outages, and turn incident findings into measurable reliability improvements.

We are looking for someone who can learn our product, assess existing monitoring and support processes, identify gaps, and build an effective alerting and incident response capability. The candidate should be comfortable working in a customer-impacting production environment and helping establish a dependable on-call support model.

Primary Focus: Production reliability, incident response, monitoring and alerting, service recovery, root cause analysis, and continuous operational improvement.