Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.
Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.
As a Senior Manager of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), you will lead the team responsible for improving the reliability, scalability, security, and operational excellence of Empower's production platforms and services in our Data Migration organization. You will work with our Enterprise SRE Center of Excellence and the Director and SRE Leads to establish the technical and operational direction for reliability engineering, including incident management, observability, release readiness, resilience engineering, and automation-first operations. This role partners closely with application development, architecture, platform, data, and security teams to strengthen production stability, accelerate safe delivery, and improve the developer and operator experience. You will manage the full lifecycle of reliability capabilitiesfrom design through implementation and continuous improvementwhile developing people, processes, and tooling that ensure predictable service outcomes.
Essential Functions
- Lead and manage SRE team(s) responsible for production reliability, incident response, and operational readiness across Empower systems and integrated platforms
- Establish and evolve SRE operating practices including on-call, incident triage/escalation, post-incident reviews, problem management, and operational governance
- Define and implement service reliability standards (e.g., SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, operational runbooks, readiness checklists) compliant to enterprise standards to drive consistent outcomes
- Drive automation-first approaches that reduce manual effort, increase operational consistency, and improve service resiliency (self-healing, auto-remediation, safe rollbacks)
- Partner with engineering teams to improve deployment workflows, release governance, rollback planning, and post-deployment verification
- Partner with Production Support teams on operations training, executions, maintenance and escalations
- Lead observability strategy and execution: monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, dashboards, and performance analysis using AWS and third-party tools
- Collaborate with data/platform and engineering teams to design and optimize AWS-native infrastructure patterns, including Infrastructure as Code and standardized CI/CD practices
- Ensure AWS security best practices are incorporated into reliability operations (IAM least privilege, network segmentation, data protection, vulnerability management)
- Coordinate with upstream/downstream system owners and data/platform teams to manage dependencies, reduce operational risk, and improve end-to-end reliability
- Provide performance management for team members by setting clear objectives, coaching, mentoring, and building career development plans
- Assign teams and individuals to reliability initiatives of varying scope; partner with delivery leadership and Agile roles to prioritize work delivering frequent, measurable improvements
- Evaluate emerging SRE, cloud, and automation technologies; recommend and drive improvements for resiliency, efficiency, cost optimization, and operational maturity
- Contribute to functional roadmaps and collaborate with leadership on long-term reliability and platform strategy
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent experience
- 8+ years of experience in SRE, production operations, platform engineering, DevOps, or software engineering, including 2+ years leading people
- Strong AWS experience (e.g., EC2, S3, IAM, RDS, Lambda, VPC, CloudFormation/CloudWatch, ECS/EKS; plus exposure to services relevant to data/platform needs)
- Demonstrated ability to lead incident response and operational processes, including troubleshooting complex production issues and driving root-cause remediation
- Experience designing or governing CI/CD pipelines and release processes (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline)
- Proficiency with automation/scripting (Python and/or Java) and strong Linux/shell skills
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation) and standardization of reusable infrastructure patterns
- Familiarity with containerization and orchestration concepts (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) and modern deployment practices (e.g., GitOps)
- Knowledge of observability tools and practices (CloudWatch and/or tools like Datadog/Splunk), performance monitoring, and operational dashboards
- Solid understanding of networking, security models, distributed systems architecture, and operational risk management
- Strong communication and cross-team collaboration skills, including the ability to partner with architecture, security, and engineering leadership
What Will Set You Apart
- Experience defining and implementing SLOs/SLIs and error-budget based operating models
- Proven track record in reliability improvements through automation, resilience engineering, and measurable reduction of incidents/toil
- Experience with cost monitoring and optimization in cloud environments
- Experience supporting data-intensive workloads (batch processing, ETL/orchestration patterns, dependency management, and data-quality controls)
- Experience leading reliability improvements across complex upstream/downstream systems and multi-team ownership boundaries
We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.
