Senior Engineering Manager, Site Reliability
Upstart · Remote · United States · 2mo ago
About Upstart
At Upstart, we’re united by a mission that matters: to radically reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing for all Americans. Every day, we bring creativity, experimentation, and advanced AI to reshape access to credit, helping millions move forward financially with clarity and confidence.
As the leading AI lending marketplace, we partner with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through technology that’s both radically intelligent and deeply human. Our platform runs over one million predictions per borrower using more than 3,000 signals, powering smarter, fairer decisions for millions of customers. But the numbers only hint at the impact. Every idea, every voice, and every contribution moves us closer to a world where credit never stands between people and their financial progress.
We’re proudly digital-first, giving most Upstarters the flexibility to do their best work from wherever they thrive, alongside teammates across 80+ cities in the US and Canada. Digital-first doesn’t mean distant. We’re intentional about in-person connection through team onsites, planning sessions, and moments that spark creativity and trust. And whether you choose to work primarily from home or collaborate in-person from one of our offices in Columbus, Austin, the Bay Area, or New York City, you’ll have the support to work in the way that works best for you.
If you’re energized by tackling meaningful problems, excited to innovate with purpose, and motivated by work that truly matters, we’d love to hear from you.
The Team:
The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team enables Upstart’s engineering organization to operate reliable, observable, and resilient systems at scale. The team owns company-wide incident management practices, reliability standards, operational readiness, and the capabilities that help engineering teams identify, respond to, and learn from production issues.
Our goal is to make reliability an integrated part of how software is designed, delivered, and operated. We are building a model where engineering teams have the trusted signals, automated safeguards, and operational practices needed to move quickly while protecting our customers and business.
The team advances observability, incident detection and response, service level objectives, operational readiness, and systemic improvements based on incident learnings. SRE partners across product engineering, infrastructure, security, and platform teams to improve reliability at scale.
The Role:
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.
You will serve as the accountable leader of the SRE function, translating reliability strategy into focused plans, clear ownership, and measurable outcomes. You will 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.
This role is suited for a hands-on leader with strong technical judgment, disciplined execution, and a track record of building high performing teams. You will 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
Minimum 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
Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote
Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.
#LI-REMOTE
#LI-MidSenior
At Upstart, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. The anticipated base salary for this position is expected to be within the below range. Your actual base pay will depend on your geographic location–with our “digital first” philosophy, Upstart uses compensation regions that vary depending on location. Individual pay is also determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
In addition, Upstart provides employees with target bonuses, equity compensation, and generous benefits packages (including medical, dental, vision, and 401k).
What you'll love
At Upstart, our benefits are designed to support your health, financial well-being, family, and personal growth. Here’s what you can expect:
- 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
For roles based in Canada, please note that we are not currently able to hire in Quebec.
Upstart is a proud Equal Opportunity Employer. Just as we are dedicated to improving access to affordable credit for all, we are committed to inclusive and fair hiring practices.
If you require reasonable accommodation in completing an application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please email candidate_accommodations@upstart.com
