Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering – Paylo Platform in Houston, Texas at PDI Technologies
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Job Description
PDI Technologies is looking for a Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering to lead the SRE organization supporting Paylo, PDI’s payments, loyalty, and fuel-pricing product suite. This role owns the reliability, infrastructure, and operational strategy for a portfolio of high-traffic, customer- and partner-facing platforms that power payment transactions, fuel pricing, loyalty and rewards, and offer/coupon redemption for convenience retail and fuel customers around the world.
This is a hands-on, leadership-first role. You will manage a team of three SRE Managers/Leads who together lead approximately 20 engineers, while staying technically engaged yourself — reviewing architecture, unblocking hard infrastructure problems, and setting the technical bar across the organization. You will bring strong, current, hands-on expertise across AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD, Terraform/OpenTofu, Jenkins, and Datadog, and you will be a strong, visible people leader who can coach managers and represent SRE to senior engineering and business stakeholders.
Directly manage and develop 3 SRE Managers/Leads and own the overall health, growth, and performance of an ~20-person SRE organization supporting the Paylo product suite.
Set the vision, priorities, and operating cadence for the SRE function; translate business and product priorities into a reliability roadmap your managers can execute against.
Build a strong bench by hiring, coaching, and developing managers and senior engineers while creating clear career paths and succession plans.
Foster a blameless, learning-oriented culture around incidents, on-call, and operational excellence.
Partner closely with engineering directors, product managers, and business stakeholders across the Paylo organization to align reliability investments with business risk and customer impact.
Stay technically engaged day to day by participating in architecture and design reviews, troubleshooting complex production issues, and directly contributing to infrastructure-as-code, Kubernetes manifests/Helm charts, and CI/CD pipelines when needed.
Set and enforce engineering standards for multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure and for container orchestration on Kubernetes at scale.
Own adoption and standards for GitOps-based continuous delivery using Argo CD/Argo Workflows, including deployment strategy, rollout policy, and multi-cluster promotion.
Own the Infrastructure-as-Code strategy across teams (Terraform, OpenTofu), including module standards, state management, drift detection, and remediation.
Own CI/CD pipeline architecture and standards built on Jenkins, driving build/deploy automation, pipeline reliability, and progressive delivery practices such as blue-green/canary deployments and automated rollback.
Evaluate and guide adoption of new infrastructure tooling and patterns as the platform evolves across AWS and Azure.
Own the observability strategy across all supported products, with deep, hands-on expertise in Datadog (APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management, dashboards, and alerting) as the standard platform for metrics, tracing, and alerting.
Define and drive adoption of SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and reliability KPIs across the organization, holding managers and teams accountable to them.
Own the incident management program end to end, including on-call structure, escalation paths, severity definitions, postmortems, and follow-through on remediation actions.
Drive root-cause analysis and long-term reliability investments that reduce Sev1/Sev2 frequency and recurrence.
Ensure appropriate resilience, disaster recovery, and capacity planning practices are in place given the sensitivity of payment- and transaction-related systems.
Partner with Security and Compliance to maintain awareness of PCI DSS and related compliance requirements and ensure the SRE organization supports audit and compliance readiness.
Track and report cost, capacity, and operational KPIs to senior leadership.
8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure/Platform Engineering, including 4+ years in a people-leadership role.
Proven experience managing managers — you have directly led team leads/managers, not just individual contributors, and are comfortable operating at the scale of ~20 total reports.
Strong, hands-on expertise across AWS and Azure — you can architect, troubleshoot, and operate multi-cloud infrastructure yourself, not just direct others to do so.
Strong, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes and Helm — cluster operations, troubleshooting at scale, and chart design/maintenance.
Strong, hands-on expertise with Argo CD/Argo Workflows for GitOps-based continuous delivery.
Strong, hands-on expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, OpenTofu), including module design and state management.
Strong, hands-on expertise with Jenkins for CI/CD pipeline design, administration, and automation.
Strong, hands-on expertise with Datadog (or equivalent enterprise observability platform), including designing monitoring/alerting strategy, dashboards, and APM/tracing at scale.
Demonstrated track record of driving incident management, on-call, and postmortem programs for high-traffic, customer-facing systems.
Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills; able to represent SRE to engineering leadership and business partners with equal credibility.
A strong, visible leadership style — someone who sets clear direction, holds teams accountable, and builds trust across the organization.
- Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship, now or in the future. PDI Technologies is unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.
Experience supporting payments, fuel/retail, or loyalty platforms, or other systems with PCI DSS or similar compliance obligations.
Relevant certifications such as CKA/CKAD, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect, or HashiCorp Terraform Associate.
Experience with messaging systems (Kafka/SQS/SNS), PagerDuty (or similar), and multi-region/multi-AZ resilience patterns.
Prior experience consolidating or standardizing SRE and DevOps practices across multiple product lines or recently-integrated/acquired teams.
Experience partnering with product and business stakeholders to translate reliability investments into business outcomes.
A stable, well-led SRE organization with clear ownership, career paths, and low regrettable attrition among your managers and their teams.
Consistent, Datadog-driven observability and SLOs in place across the organization, with measurable reduction in Sev1/Sev2 incidents and mean time to detect/resolve.
Modern, standardized infrastructure practices — GitOps delivery via Argo, IaC via Terraform/OpenTofu, and reliable CI/CD via Jenkins — adopted consistently across teams and clouds.
A mature, blameless incident-management culture with strong postmortem follow-through.
Strong cross-functional trust with engineering, product, and security/compliance stakeholders.