[Hiring] Site Reliability Engineering Team Lead @Cerence

Role Description

The Site Reliability Engineering Team Lead (Principal SRE) leads Cerence's Site Reliability Engineering team, owning the reliability, availability, and operational health of our cloud-native automotive AI platform. This role combines technical leadership of the team and the function with deep technical credibility:

• Help select and mentor the team.
• Define the reliability roadmap.
• Govern SLI/SLO/SLA targets.
• Champion a blameless culture.
• Serve as the Tier 2 technical escalation point for major incidents.
• Partner with development leadership to embed reliability into the SDLC.
• Set strategic direction for observability and automation.

This is a Principal-level role on our technical track, with no direct reports: you lead the team and own the function through technical authority. The ideal candidate brings a strong hands-on background in SRE, cloud platforms, and container orchestration, and a track record of leading site reliability teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in site reliability, DevOps, or cloud platform roles.
• A track record of setting technical direction and holding standards across a team.
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes, Docker, Istio).
• Experience with public cloud platforms (Azure primarily; AWS and Google Cloud).
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices (e.g., Terraform, Flux).
• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language (Python, Go, Shell, etc.).
• Strong UNIX/Linux background, including system configuration, performance debugging, and network fundamentals.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

Requirements

• Previous site reliability leadership experience.
• Experience leading distributed or multi-site technical teams.
• Background in high-availability service design (redundancy, failover, blast radius).
• Experience with log aggregation and analytics platforms (Loki, Thanos).
• Familiarity with ITSM and project tooling (Jira, Confluence).
• Experience in automotive, embedded, or latency-sensitive production environments.

Benefits

• Annual bonus opportunity.
• Insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability).
• Paid time off.
• Paid holidays.
• Company contribution to the RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan).
• Equity awards for certain positions and levels.
• Remote and/or hybrid work available depending on the position.