Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Interested in working on cutting-edge blockchain technology and creating equitable access to the global financial system? Since 2014, the mission-driven team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has helped fuel the tremendous growth of the Stellar blockchain network, an open-source platform that operates at high-scale today. Developers and companies around the world build on it, and the SDF team is expanding to support the rapidly growing and changing Stellar ecosystem.

SDF is looking for a Director of Site Reliability Engineering to lead a small, high-leverage SRE team and help shape how engineering teams own, operate, and improve production services.

This is a senior engineering leadership role reporting to the CTO. You will set the vision, operating model, and culture for SRE while owning the core infrastructure services that help SDF engineering teams build, deploy, observe, and operate software with confidence.

Engineering teams at SDF own the services they build. SRE provides the frameworks, standards, shared infrastructure, tooling, observability practices, and enablement model that make strong service ownership possible across engineering.

You will be successful here if you bring strong technical judgment, pragmatic leadership, and the ability to influence through trust, clarity, and execution. SDF is a small, mission-driven foundation with a broad technical surface area, so this role requires leverage, ownership, and a bias toward solving the right problems over creating processes for its own sake.

In this role, you will:

Lead, coach, and develop a distributed SRE team, setting a clear vision, charter, operating model, priorities, and success measures.

Define and roll out a Service Ownership & Maturity Framework across engineering, with expectations that vary appropriately by service criticality.

Own and improve core engineering infrastructure services, including cloud foundations, Kubernetes and compute patterns, CI/CD, observability, secrets management, GitHub workflows, and infrastructure automation.

Help engineering teams become stronger owners and operators of their services through better standards, dashboards, runbooks, alerting, escalation paths, operational readiness, and deployment practices.

Make reliability, operational maturity, infrastructure health, and developer productivity more measurable through trusted metrics and practical operational intelligence.

Improve deployment automation, resilience, self-healing patterns, disaster recovery readiness, and service reliability based on actual impact and risk.

Mature incident response, escalation, postmortems, and on-call health across a geographically distributed team.

Build paved paths and self-service infrastructure that reduce toil, lower cognitive load, and help engineering teams move faster while strengthening ownership and reliability.

Partner closely with Security, Compliance, Legal, Finance, Procurement, and Corporate IT where infrastructure, access management, cloud operations, vendor review, or controls intersect with engineering.

Pragmatically evaluate AI-assisted and agentic workflows where they can improve infrastructure operations, service ownership, developer workflows, or toil reduction.

You have:

10+ years of experience in SRE, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, production operations, or closely related engineering roles.

5+ years of experience leading, managing, or formally developing infrastructure, SRE, platform, or reliability engineers.

Strong experience defining team charters, operating models, roadmaps, success measures, and engineering practices for infrastructure or reliability teams.

Deep technical judgment across cloud infrastructure, production operations, distributed systems, reliability tradeoffs, automation, and operational risk.

3+ years of experience with modern cloud infrastructure in AWS, GCP, or similar environments.

3+ years of experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, declarative systems, CI/CD, and deployment safety.

Strong experience with observability, monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards, SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, and on-call practices.

Experience helping product or application engineering teams improve service ownership, operational readiness, and production accountability.

A pragmatic approach to tooling: you understand when to build, buy, adapt, simplify, or retire systems based on the actual engineering problem.

The ability to operate effectively in a small or mid-sized engineering organization where influence comes from credibility, judgment, and outcomes rather than bureaucracy.

Clear executive communication skills and the ability to partner directly with a CTO and senior engineering leaders.

Bonus Points if:

Experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or platform work in a lean, high-agency organization.

Experience supporting globally distributed teams or 24/7 operational coverage.

Experience improving developer productivity through paved paths, self-service infrastructure, automation, and reduced toil.

Experience with infrastructure security fundamentals, secrets management, access controls, cloud security practices, or compliance-related infrastructure controls.

Experience in financial services, regulated environments, blockchain, crypto, Web3, or other high-reliability technical ecosystems.

Experience evaluating vendors and infrastructure platforms with skepticism, technical rigor, and cost discipline.

Practical experience applying AI-assisted or agentic workflows to infrastructure, reliability, operations, observability, or developer productivity.

We offer competitive pay with a base salary range for this position of $205,000 - $305,000 depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. In addition, we offer lumen-denominated grants along with the following perks and benefits:

USA Benefits/Perks:

Competitive health, dental & vision coverage with most plans covered at 100% for the employee + any dependents

Flexible time off + 15 company holidays including a company-wide holiday break

401(k) with 4% match

Commuter benefits with $250/month employer contribution

Health & Dependent Care FSA Accounts

Health Savings Account (HSA) with monthly employer contribution

Gym reimbursement ($80 per month)

Life & ADD (1x salary, up to $250K)

Short & Long term disability

Generous paid parental leave for all parents, plus paid pregnancy disability leave for birthing parents

Family building benefits through Kindbody

Wellbeing benefits (One Medical, Rightway, Headspace)

L&D budget of $1,500/year

Daily lunch and snacks in office

Company retreats

#LI-Hybrid

About Stellar

Stellar is more than a blockchain. Powered by a decentralized, fast, scalable, and uniquely sustainable network made for financial products and services and a thriving and passionate ecosystem that includes a non-profit organization driven by a mission, Stellar is paving the path to unlock the world’s economic potential through blockchain technology. Built with speed and low costs in mind, the Stellar network provides builders and financial institutions worldwide a platform to issue assets, and to send and convert currencies in real time creating real world utility. Founded in 2014, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) supports the continued development and growth of the Stellar network and also serves the ecosystem of NGOs, corporations, universities, small businesses, governments, and solo entrepreneurs building on the Stellar network through tooling, funding and strategic collaborations. Together, Stellar is where blockchain meets the real world.

About the Stellar Development Foundation

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a non-profit organization focused on working with and supporting change-makers to create equi