Senior Engineering Manager - SRE

Company: NIUM

Website: Visit Website

LinkedIn: Visit LinkedIn

Business Type: Startup

Company Type: Product

Business Model: B2B

Funding Stage: Series D+

Industry: FinTech, Payments

Salary Range: 40-80 Lacs PA

Job Description

The Role :

Nium is looking for a Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering to lead the teams responsible for the availability, performance, scalability, and operational excellence of our global payments platform. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will build and grow a team of SREs, define the reliability roadmap, and partner closely with product engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to ensure Nium's systems meet the always-on expectations of a regulated financial platform operating across 100+ markets.

You will own incident management, observability, capacity planning, and production readiness practices, while championing a culture of blameless postmortems, proactive risk reduction, and engineering-driven automation. This role sits at the intersection of engineering leadership and operational rigor, and reports into Nium's engineering leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of SREs and reliability engineers across multiple time zones, setting clear goals, career paths, and performance expectations.
• Own Nium's reliability strategy — defining and driving SLIs/SLOs/error budgets across critical payment, card issuance, and compliance services.
• Drive incident management end-to-end: on-call structure, escalation paths, major incident response, and blameless postmortems that produce durable fixes, not just tickets.
• Partner with product engineering leaders to embed reliability, scalability, and operational readiness into the software development lifecycle from design through launch.
• Build and scale observability (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) so that issues are detected and diagnosed before they impact customers or partner banks.
• Lead capacity planning and performance engineering for systems processing high-volume, real-time financial transactions across a global, multi-region infrastructure.
• Champion automation and self-healing systems to reduce toil, eliminate manual runbooks, and improve mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-resolve.
• Own disaster recovery, business continuity, and chaos engineering practices, running regular game days to validate resilience assumptions.
• Collaborate with Security and Compliance teams to ensure infrastructure practices meet regulatory and audit requirements (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and regional financial regulations).
• Manage the reliability budget: tooling investments, cloud cost/performance trade-offs, and staffing plans, in partnership with finance and engineering leadership.
• Represent SRE in executive reviews, translating technical risk and system health into business-relevant reporting for leadership and the board.
• Establish and continuously refine production readiness reviews, runbooks, and operational standards across all engineering teams.
  
  

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure, or site reliability engineering, with 4+ years in a people-management or technical leadership role leading SRE/DevOps/Infrastructure teams.
• Proven track record operating and scaling production systems for a high-availability, transaction-heavy platform — fintech, payments, banking, or e-commerce experience strongly preferred.
• Deep hands-on expertise with cloud infrastructure (AWS) Kubernetes, container orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar).
• Strong background in observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK/OpenSearch, or equivalent) and building alerting that reduces noise while catching real issues.
• Demonstrated experience defining and operationalizing SLOs/error budgets, and using them to drive engineering prioritization.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, databases, caching, messaging queues, and API-driven microservice architectures at scale.
• Experience leading major incident response for critical, customer-facing systems, including postmortem processes that drive real change.
• Familiarity with security and compliance frameworks relevant to financial services (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001) and how they shape infrastructure and access practices.
• Excellent communication skills — able to translate technical reliability concepts for engineering peers, product leaders, and executives alike.
• A pragmatic, metrics-driven approach to engineering decisions: you measure before you optimize, and you test assumptions in production rather than in theory.
• Experience with scripting/automation (Python, Go, or Bash) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, ArgoCD, GitLab CI, or similar).
  
  

Nice to Have

• Experience operating systems subject to real-time payment rails, card networks, or banking core integrations.
• Prior experience running SRE or infrastructure functions through hypergrowth or rapid international expansion.
• Exposure to FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization at scale.
• Experience building or scaling an SRE function from the ground up within an existing engineering organization.