Senior Manager – Operations & Reliability (DevOps Focus)

Company Description

It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today — ServiceNow stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500®. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work. But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.

Job Description

Job Description

We are looking for a Senior Manager to lead the strategic build-out of our DevOps and reliability practice within product engineering. This is a foundational leadership role—not a traditional SRE position—with a mandate to establish a high-impact, cross-functional DevOps capability that elevates how we deliver reliable, observable, and resilient software.

You will be responsible for building and leading a small but focused team that delivers best-in-class tooling, automation, and operational insights, including the application of emerging AI-driven technologies to improve alerting, diagnostics, and incident prevention. You’ll work directly with senior engineering and business leadership to evangelize DevOps culture, establish buy-in for modern practices, and position your team as a trusted enabler across the engineering organization.

What you get to do in this role:

• Strategic Practice Formation:
  Design and stand up a new DevOps enablement function within product engineering, defining its mission, scope, and operating model in close collaboration with SRE, Operations, and Platform teams.
• Team Building & Leadership:
  Recruit, develop, and manage a small, high-leverage team focused on DevOps tooling, automation, and culture. Set clear goals and ensure delivery of meaningful improvements to reliability and operational workflows.
• Evangelize DevOps Culture:
  Champion DevOps principles and reliability-first thinking within engineering. Act as a cultural catalyst by educating teams, coaching leaders, and embedding continuous improvement into day-to-day engineering practice.
• AI-Enabled Tooling & Innovation:
  Identify, assess, and implement modern AI/ML-powered tools that advance incident prediction, smart alerting, automated response, and observability enhancements.
• Leadership Communication & Influence:
  Serve as a visible, composed representative of reliability and incident insights to the highest levels of leadership. Present post-incident reviews with clarity and candor, including difficult but necessary truths.
• Stakeholder Engagement:
  Partner with Directors, VPs, and other senior leaders to align DevOps priorities with business goals, and secure buy-in for tooling and process changes across organizational boundaries.
• Continuous Improvement & Incident Review Practices:
  Implement lightweight, scalable processes for incident management, root cause analysis, and blameless retrospectives. Ensure that lessons learned lead to measurable outcomes.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

• Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI's potential impact on the function or industry.
• 12+ years in engineering or operations roles, with 5+ years in people management and cross-functional leadership.
• Deep understanding of DevOps, site reliability, and modern operational practices.
• Proven experience building or scaling a DevOps or reliability-focused function in a complex engineering organization.
• Track record of introducing new tooling and automation to improve developer experience and service reliability.
• Strong knowledge of the observability and CI/CD ecosystem, and exposure to AI/ML-powered ops tooling.
• Exceptional communication skills, with experience presenting incident reviews and risk assessments to senior executives.
• Ability to influence without authority, manage conflict, and drive consensus in ambiguous or high-pressure situations.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $187,600 - $328,300, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation st