[Hiring] Director, Site Reliability Engineering @8x8

Role Description

8x8 connects our customers and teams globally. Our XCaaS platform, the 8x8 Experience Communications Platform, brings voice, video, chat, contact center, and communications APIs together in one cloud platform, so organizations can deliver better employee and customer experiences. Millions of people rely on it every day, and reliability is at the center of what we deliver.

Our engineering teams own their services in production. We are now building a central Site Reliability Engineering team with a platform-wide view. It will define how we measure reliability, build the tools and standards that help every team run their services well, and engineer shared points of failure out of the platform before they affect customers. We are looking for the Director who will build and lead it.

You will build 8x8's central SRE function from the ground up and lead a team across US and EU time zones. Your team will set service level objectives for our most important customer flows, improve observability and work with engineering teams to ensure the platform has the capacity and redundancy it needs. You will own the platform's dependency map and shared-infrastructure inventory, set the operational standards every service is held to, and prove through regular testing that failover works. Engineering teams keep ownership of their services. Your team covers the parts of the platform that no single team owns and raises the reliability bar for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a global SRE team across US and EU time zones, including its charter, operating model, hiring and career development.
• Define the reliability strategy and multi-year roadmap for the 8x8 platform, aligned with business and customer priorities.
• Establish SLIs, SLOs and error budgets for critical customer journeys, and use them to guide engineering priorities and balance release velocity with stability.
• Set platform-wide standards for observability, including monitoring, logging, tracing and alerting, with a focus on actionable, customer-impacting signals.
• Drive the reduction of operational toil through automation, self-service tooling, and infrastructure and configuration as code.
• Partner with platform and CI/CD teams to build reliability into the software delivery lifecycle, including progressive rollouts and automated rollback.
• Own capacity planning and performance engineering for shared infrastructure and high-traffic services.
• Maintain a comprehensive view of service dependencies and shared infrastructure, and lead the identification and remediation of single points of failure.
• Lead resilience and disaster recovery programs, including regular failover testing across data centers and game days for critical components.
• Establish production readiness standards and reviews for new services and high-risk infrastructure changes.
• Partner with the incident management team to strengthen incident response processes, and participate in high-severity incidents to provide platform-wide technical expertise and help restore service quickly.
• Champion a blameless postmortem culture and ensure that lessons learned and corrective actions are carried through to completion.
• Serve as a trusted reliability partner to engineering, product and executive leadership, and report on platform reliability and progress against goals.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in site reliability, infrastructure, platform or production engineering, including 5+ years leading SRE or infrastructure teams.
• Has built or scaled an SRE or reliability function, with measurable results such as improved availability, SLO adoption or reduced toil.
• Strong SRE practice: SLIs and SLOs, error budgets, observability, toil reduction, capacity planning, production readiness reviews and blameless postmortems.
• Experience with incident management practices and with participating in high-severity incident response in large-scale production environments.
• Deep infrastructure knowledge: networking, load balancers and high-availability pairs, DNS, firewalls and NAT, virtualization, and public cloud (AWS preferred).
• Experience running services across both company-operated data centers and public cloud, including multi-site failover and disaster recovery.
• A software engineering background: can write automation and tooling, read code and debug distributed applications.
• Comfortable with Linux, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code (for example Terraform or Ansible), Kafka or similar messaging systems, and relational databases at scale.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools (for example Prometheus, Grafana).
• Can set standards and get commitments from engineering teams that do not report to you.
• Clear communication, and the ability to explain reliability to executives in business terms.

Preferred

• Experience with real-time communications: VoIP, SIP, WebRTC.
• Experience with enterprise load balancers and network devices such as F5, Citrix ADC or Fortinet.
• Chaos engineering or game-day programs.
• Service catalogs and dependency mapping (for example Backstage).
• Experience leading teams across multiple countries and time zones.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Benefits

• The compensation range reflects the Company’s good faith belief at the time of posting.
• 8x8 has different base pay ranges for different work locations within the United States.
• Offers are made within the base pay range applicable at the time.
• Certain roles are eligible for additional rewards, including discretionary merit increases, bonus and/or stock.
• Certain roles have the opportunity to earn sales variable compensation incentives based on the terms of the plan and the employee’s role.