Site Reliability Engineer Manager

As the Site Reliability Engineer at Illuminate Literacy, you will serve a critical role in our mission to eradicate illiteracy. You will lead and oversee our production environment's reliability, security, and quality assurance. This role involves managing a multifaceted team responsible for operational health, security protocols, and quality control of our applications, ensuring an outstanding and secure experience for our users.

📌 Our ideal candidate has experience working in remote-first, distributed teams. This position is remote based in the US.

About the Organization

We are on a mission to unlock the great reader in every child to end illiteracy in our country -- centering the experiences of Black, Latino, and Native American students and students experiencing poverty. We are developing research-based, identity-affirming PK-8+ digital literacy tools that leverage student uniquenesses to help every child master the foundational reading skills needed to become strong, confident readers. We’re currently hiring our founding team of mission-driven individuals committed to helping us develop a scalable, impactful reading product that helps us eradicate illiteracy in America.

Illuminate Literacy is fiscally sponsored by Cambiar Education, a 501c3 that supports transformative leaders of public school systems and educational entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions that disrupt the patterns of educational inequity.

🔥 Key Highlights 🔥

• Two fully digital prototypes built and currently being tested with a dozen schools and out-of-school partners.
• Fully-funded sister R&D organization, AERDF Reading Reimagined, to explore major unknowns in literacy learning for priority students and to bridge cutting-edge research to practice
• Founding team with deep expertise in teaching kids to read, on technology, at scale, comprised of literacy experts, practitioners, designers, engineers, and former education systems leaders. Founded and led by Rebecca Kockler, former Assistant Superintendent of Academic Content for the Louisiana Department of Education and developer of the nationally recognized ELA Guidebooks
• Extensive relationships with major systems leaders across the country requesting to be co-designers and first adopters; 100% retention of current partners year over year
• Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and to an inclusive R&D and product development approach that centers Black, Latino and Native American students and those experiencing poverty

What You’ll Do:

• Oversee the day-to-day operations of our production environment, ensuring high availability, performance, and efficiency.
• Lead and manage the on-call process, including incident management and post-mortem analysis.
• Develop and enforce escalation procedures to ensure timely resolution of production issues.
• Handle customer technical requests, data deletion, and data reporting, while maintaining compliance with data privacy standards.
• Collaborate closely with development teams to build reliable and scalable systems.
• Drive continuous improvement in system reliability and automation.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers.
• Implement best practices for infrastructure management, including monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning.
• Oversee the Quality Assurance team, ensuring rigorous testing protocols and practices for software releases. Implement strategies to enhance test automation and continuous integration processes.
• Manage the Security team to maintain and enhance our security posture, including vulnerability assessments, compliance with data privacy standards, and implementation of security best practices.
• Lead, mentor, and grow the SRE, QA, and Security teams. Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
• Liaise with internal and external stakeholders to report on system health, incident management, and security status. Ensure transparency and effective communication of QA processes and results.
• Contribute to the strategic planning of infrastructure management, security policies, and quality assurance standards.

Requirements

This Job is For You If You Have:

• 7+ years of experience in SRE/DevOps, QA, and/or Security roles with a minimum of 3 years in a managerial capacity.
• Proficiency in cloud infrastructure, DevOps tools, security protocols, and QA methodologies.
• Strong leadership skills and experience managing cross-functional teams.
• Excellent problem-solving, organizational, and analytical abilities.
• Superb communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively across departments.
• Structured, collaborative, and clear written and oral communication skills, especially in conveying analytical concepts to cross-functional teammates with expertise in disciplines outside of traditional tech
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills
• A desire to make the world a better place through technology and reading education
• Expertise in applying user insights, data, and statistical analyses to inform decisions
• A track record as a voracious, curious, and active learner
• A knack for self-starting, rolling up your sleeves to do the work, being resourceful and innovative in finding answers in an ambiguous situations
• Experience leading teams through ambiguity and high stakes trade off decisions
• Humility and kindness towards others and themselves, acknowledging limitations and being open to learning from mistakes and feedback

Benefits

What You’ll Receive:

• Salary range of $160,000 - $185,000 per annum
• Competitive medical, dental, vision benefits
• Opportunity to work remotely for a mission-driven company full of change-makers
• 401k with 4% guaranteed match
• Work environment that values balance and harmony with a deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion
• Opportunity to travel and meet your team members in-person 2x per year