Manager, Software Engineering

The Position         Uplight is creating a new category of energy. We make software that manages energy resources in homes and businesses—including things like smart thermostats, electric vehicles, solar panels, storage batteries, heat pumps, and even people’s behavior—to generate, shift, or save energy to balance the grid, making it more efficient and reliable. This creates clean energy capacity that can be used by the power grid instead of burning more fossil fuels. Our solutions accelerate the transition to clean energy and save money for energy customers.We are seeking a Manager Software Engineering to join our team and help us achieve our ambitious goals for our business and the planet.How you will make an impact:

• Team Leadership and Management:
• Supervise and manage a team of Site Reliability Engineers, including hiring, training, mentoring, and evaluating performance to build a high-functioning team.
• Set clear objectives, performance expectations, and development plans for SRE team members, ensuring alignment with company goals.
• Conduct regular one-on-one meetings, team meetings, and performance reviews to provide feedback and address team needs.
• Service Reliability and Performance Management:
• Develop and implement strategies to improve the reliability, availability, and scalability of critical services and infrastructure.
• Oversee the development and maintenance of monitoring, alerting, and incident response systems to ensure proactive management of service health.
• Lead efforts in capacity planning, load testing, and disaster recovery planning to ensure systems can handle expected and unexpected loads.
• Incident and Problem Management:
• Manage and coordinate incident response efforts, including real-time troubleshooting, communication with stakeholders, and leading post-incident reviews.
• Drive root cause analysis and implement corrective actions to prevent future incidents, ensuring continuous improvement of systems and processes.
• Establish and enforce incident management protocols, including on-call rotations, escalation paths, and documentation.
• Automation and Tooling:
• Lead initiatives to automate repetitive tasks and processes, reducing manual intervention and enhancing operational efficiency.
• Guide the team in building and maintaining infrastructure as code (IaC), continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and configuration management tools.
• Evaluate, select, and implement tools and technologies that improve SRE capabilities, ensuring alignment with industry best practices.
• Collaboration with Engineering and Product Teams:
• Collaborate with software engineering, DevOps, and product teams to integrate reliability best practices into the development lifecycle.
• Serve as a technical liaison between SRE and other teams, providing guidance on reliability, performance, and operational aspects of projects.
• Participate in architectural reviews and provide input to ensure that new designs meet reliability and scalability standards.
• Operational Excellence and Process Improvement:
• Develop and enforce operational standards, procedures, and best practices for system reliability, monitoring, and incident management.
• Identify and eliminate operational inefficiencies and bottlenecks, focusing on reducing toil and improving team productivity.
• Drive a culture of continuous improvement by implementing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and enhance service reliability.
• Technical Leadership and Oversight:
• Provide technical leadership to the SRE team, guiding them in designing, building, and maintaining reliable and scalable infrastructure.
• Review and approve technical designs and implementations, ensuring they adhere to reliability, security, and performance standards.
• Stay updated on the latest trends, technologies, and best practices in site reliability engineering, and advocate for their adoption within the team.
• Budget and Resource Management:
• Manage the SRE team’s budget, including software licenses, cloud infrastructure costs, and tools procurement, ensuring cost-effectiveness and alignment with business needs.
• Optimize resource allocation to maximize the impact of the SRE team, balancing workload, project demands, and operational responsibili