[Hiring] Senior Engineering Manager, Site Reliability @Upstart

Role Description

As the Senior Engineering Manager of Site Reliability Engineering, you will lead a team responsible for improving the reliability and operational maturity of Upstart’s products and services. You will drive high impact improvements across incident management, observability, operational readiness, and reliability engineering.

• Serve as the accountable leader of the SRE function, translating reliability strategy into focused plans, clear ownership, and measurable outcomes.
• Partner closely with engineering leaders to establish reliability expectations, identify systemic risks, and build scalable capabilities that enable teams to operate services safely and independently.
• Balance immediate operational needs with durable improvements that reduce risk, strengthen resilience, and improve how Upstart learns from production.

How you’ll make an impact

• Team Leadership and Execution
  • Manage and develop a team focused on incident management, observability, operational readiness, and reliability engineering.
  • Define a clear charter, priorities, roadmap, and measurable outcomes for the SRE function.
  • Translate strategy into capacity aware plans with explicit trade offs, ownership, milestones, and success measures.
  • Maintain visibility into delivery health, operational risks, and team performance, intervening early when execution drifts.
  • Build a resilient operating model through cross-training, shared context, effective delegation, and clear primary and secondary ownership.
  • Set a high bar for technical quality, operating rigor, and executive communication.
  • Develop engineers and leaders who can independently own complex reliability initiatives.
• Incident Management and Learning
  • Evolve Upstart’s incident management program to improve detection, response, coordination, communication, and recovery.
  • Establish clear standards for managing high severity incidents and provide visible leadership during critical events.
  • Improve postmortem quality and ensure incident learnings result in durable engineering improvements.
  • Identify recurring failure patterns and drive systemic solutions across teams.
  • Create strong feedback loops from incidents into roadmaps, service standards, operational readiness requirements, and measurable risk reduction.
• Observability and Reliability Engineering
  • Improve the quality, accessibility, and trustworthiness of signals used to understand production health.
  • Drive consistent practices across metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and service health.
  • Advance the use of service level objectives and customer impact signals to guide priorities and operational decisions.
  • Reduce detection gaps, noisy alerts, manual investigation, and recurring operational toil.
  • Define measurable reliability outcomes and use data to prioritize investments and communicate impact.
  • Partner with platform and product engineering teams to embed reliability into standard engineering workflows.
• Operational Readiness and Resilience
  • Establish scalable operational readiness standards for new services, major launches, and architectural changes.
  • Set clear expectations for service ownership, monitoring, capacity, failure handling, and incident response.
  • Identify systemic reliability risks and partner with engineering teams to prioritize and address them.
  • Improve resilience through automation, failure testing, recovery capabilities, and operational safeguards.
  • Build operating mechanisms that turn reviews and analysis into clear decisions, owners, timelines, and sustained follow through.
  • Align stakeholders and dependencies before critical launches and engineering decisions.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of reliability engineering management experience and 7+ years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Significant hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or an equivalent role responsible for operating and improving production systems.
• Direct experience managing an SRE, Production Engineering, or equivalent reliability function, including ownership of its strategy, roadmap, operating model, and outcomes.
• Strong technical depth in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and production operations.
• Experience leading high severity incident response and improving incident management practices at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to translate strategy into focused, capacity aware plans and deliver measurable outcomes.
• Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high performing engineers and engineering leaders.
• Strong cross-functional leadership and communication, with the ability to turn complex operational data into clear decisions and drive alignment across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating large scale, highly available distributed systems.
• Experience implementing or evolving service-level objectives and error-budget practices.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or similar technologies.
• Experience developing incident management, operational readiness, or resilience programs across a large engineering organization.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, AWS, and modern cloud native architectures.
• Experience supporting major platform or architectural transitions.
• Strong product mindset when building internal reliability capabilities.
• Experience establishing executive level reliability reporting and operating reviews.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including base pay, bonus opportunities, and annual equity grants that vest quarterly.
• Retirement benefits to help you plan for the future, including a 401(k) or Group Retirement Savings Plan with a company match of $2 for every $1 contributed, up to $15,000 annually (USD in the US, CAD in Canada).
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) with discounted stock purchase options for eligible employees (US only).
• Comprehensive health coverage designed to support you and your family, including medical, dental, vision, and wellness resources for US and supplemental health coverage for Canada.
• Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart for eligible plans (US only).
• Income protection benefits, including life insurance and disability coverage for added financial security.
• Paid time off, sick leave, and company holidays, in line with local requirements.
• Paid family and parental leave to support caregiving and major life moments (duration varies by country).
• Family-centered benefits to support fertility, parenthood, and caregiving needs.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) offering mental health support and life-centered resources.
• Financial wellness resources, including access to financial planning tools and a financial concierge service (US Only).
• Annual wellness allowance to support your physical and emotional well-being and personal development, based on what matters most to you.
• Annual productivity allowance to invest in relevant tools and resources you need to do your best work, no matter where you work from.
• Connection and community through team events, all-company updates, and employee resource groups (ERGs).
• Onsite perks, including catered lunches and fully stocked micro-kitchens when working from one of our offices in the Bay Area, Austin, Columbus, and New York City (opening Summer 2026!).