Sr. Manager, SRE

About Backblaze

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.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $125m in revenue and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We are seeking an Sr. Manager, SRE to join our team!

About the Role

We are seeking a seasoned Sr. Manager, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to lead a global team of engineers responsible for the performance, availability, and reliability of our distributed services and infrastructure. This leader will drive SRE strategy, implement operational excellence frameworks, and partner with engineering and product teams to ensure customer-facing platforms meet and exceed SLAs.

The Sr. Manager, SRE will balance hands-on technical leadership with strategic management, guiding the team in automation, observability, incident management, and service scalability while mentoring future leaders.

Key Responsibilities:

Leadership & Strategy

• Build, lead, and mentor a team of SREs across multiple regions and time zones.
• Define the long-term vision and roadmap for SRE, aligning with organizational objectives.
• Partner with product and engineering to ensure reliability is embedded in design, development, and operations.

Operational Excellence

• Own the end-to-end reliability of critical customer-facing services.
• Establish and maintain SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to measure and enforce service quality.
• Drive root cause analysis and problem management for major incidents, ensuring long-term fixes are prioritized.
• Champion adoption of ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).

Automation & Tooling

• Expand automation in deployment, monitoring, testing, and incident response to reduce toil.
• Oversee observability platforms (e.g., Catchpoint, Grafana, Moogsoft/BigPanda, Prometheus, Datadog, etc.).
• Ensure robust configuration, capacity, and change management practices.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Network Engineering, DevOps, NOC, and Product Engineering on scalable, resilient architecture.
• Support business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance requirements.
• Engage with vendors and service providers to manage SLAs and performance outcomes.

People Development

• Hire, coach, and develop engineers and managers, creating strong career paths within SRE.
• Foster a culture of reliability, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Lead succession planning and leadership pipeline development.

Qualifications:

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred).
• 10+ years in infrastructure, reliability, or operations engineering roles.
• 5+ years in people leadership with experience managing managers and global teams.

Technical Skills

• Deep expertise in Linux operating systems (administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting, security hardening).
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, private cloud), and networking fundamentals.
• Solid background in observability, monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks.
• Proficiency with automation (Python, Go, Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines).
• Familiarity with containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices architectures.
• Strong understanding of ITIL/OSS frameworks, SLO/error budget practices, and incident management at scale.

Leadership Skills

• Proven ability to manage large-scale, high-availability environments.
• Strong communication skills with executive presence; able to translate technical topics into business outcomes.
• Demonstrated success in building and maturing