Manager, Site Reliability Engineering

Forward Deployed SRE Program Leadership

• Lead the Forward Deployed SRE program, placing SRE professionals into high-priority application and platform teams to address complex reliability challenges and improve operational maturity.

• Manage program managers, SRE leaders, and technical leads responsible for coordinating engagements across multiple technology domains.

• Establish a transparent intake and prioritization process based on customer impact, service criticality, operational risk, incident history, reliability maturity, strategic importance, and anticipated business value.

• Partner with application and platform leaders to define engagement objectives, scope, deliverables, staffing, success measures, dependencies, and duration.

• Ensure Forward Deployed SRE teams deliver sustainable engineering improvements rather than becoming long-term substitutes for application support or production operations.

• Establish shared accountability for participation, knowledge transfer, remediation activities, and long-term ownership of implemented reliability capabilities.

• Develop transition and exit plans that enable application and platform teams to sustain SRE practices after engagements conclude.

• Evaluate engagement effectiveness using measurable outcomes such as availability, SLO attainment, incident frequency, restoration time, alert quality, automation adoption, toil reduction, change-failure rate, deployment reliability, and engineering maturity.

• Convert common findings and lessons learned into reusable standards, automation, tools, training, and engineering patterns.

• Continuously optimize the Forward Deployed SRE operating model based on demand, capacity, outcomes, stakeholder feedback, and changes in technology strategy.

Organizational and People Leadership

• Lead an organization of employees and contingent resources through direct and indirect management relationships.

• Manage and develop program managers, SRE managers, technical leaders, and senior engineering professionals.

• Establish clear roles, responsibilities, decision rights, performance expectations, and accountability across the SRE organization.

• Build a high-performing organization with expertise in reliability engineering, observability, cloud platforms, release engineering, deployment orchestration, automation, Infrastructure as Code, incident management, resiliency engineering, testing, and program delivery.

• Recruit, retain, coach, and develop diverse engineering and program management talent.

• Conduct workforce, capacity, and succession planning to ensure the organization has the leadership and technical capabilities required to meet current and future demand.

• Define career paths and skill-development plans for SRE professionals in partnership with engineering and human resources leaders.

• Provide regular feedback, performance management, recognition, coaching, and development opportunities.

• Create an environment that encourages engineering discipline, continuous learning, constructive challenge, accountability, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

• Promote an environment that supports a culture of belonging and reflects the M&T Bank brand.

• Manage staffing and sourcing strategies, including the appropriate use of employees, contingent labor, managed services, and specialized partners.

• Ensure third-party resources and service providers meet applicable engineering, security, risk, performance, financial, and contractual expectations.

Reliability Engineering Governance

• Establish standards and governance for Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives, error budgets, availability targets, and reliability reporting.

• Partner with service owners and business stakeholders to align reliability objectives with customer expectations, service criticality, business impact, risk tolerance, and cost.

• Define common reliability metrics and executive-level reporting for service health, operational performance, deployment health, risk, and improvement outcomes.

• Ensure reliability metrics are accurate, actionable, consistently defined, and tied to accountable service owners.

• Establish governance for error-budget decisions, including remediation, release-risk evaluation, delivery tradeoffs, escalation, and investment prioritization.

• Drive adoption of reliability-by-design practices throughout the Software Development Lifecycle.

• Establish operational readiness requirements for applications and platforms entering production or undergoing material change.

• Ensure readiness assessments address availability, scalability, observability, performance, supportability, recoverability, security, testing, capacity, release and rollback readiness, documentation, and operational ownership.

• Partner with architecture and engineering leaders to incorporate reliability requirements into solution designs, architecture reviews, and engineering standards.

• Identify systemic reliability risks and sponsor cross-organizational remediation programs.

Release Engineering and Deployment Orchestration

• Establish enterprise SRE standards for safe, repeatable, observable, and recoverable application and infrastructure releases.

• Partner with application development, platform engineering, cloud engineering, quality engineering, change management, and technology operations teams to improve release and deployment practices.

• Define approved deployment patterns based on service criticality, architecture, customer impact, technical capability, and risk.

• Promote progressive delivery practices, including blue-green deployments, canary releases, rolling deployments, ring-based deployments, feature flags, traffic splitting, and controlled production experimentation where appropriate.

• Establish requirements for automated pre-deployment, in-deployment, and post-deployment validation using technical health signals, service-level indicators, business metrics, and customer-experience measures.

• Promote deployment orchestration that integrates CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, automated testing, observability, approval controls, and policy enforcement.

• Establish standards for automated rollback, roll-forward, traffic evacuation, deployment pausing, and recovery when release health thresholds are breached.

• Define release health criteria and quality gates based on error rates, latency, saturation, availability, dependency health, business transactions, and customer-impact indicators.

• Promote small, incremental, independently deployable changes that reduce release complexity and limit failure impact.

• Partner with platform teams to provide reusable deployment templates, pipeline capabilities, policy-as-code controls, and self-service release patterns.

• Establish traceability between changes, deployments, configuration updates, incidents, service telemetry, and business outcomes.

• Improve release observability through deployment markers, version-aware dashboards, automated change correlation, and real-time health analysis.

• Use error budgets, service criticality, testing evidence, deployment history, and current service health to inform release-risk decisions.

• Measure and improve deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change-failure rate, rollback effectiveness, failed deployment recovery time, and release-related customer impact.

• Ensure deployment practices comply with applicable technology risk, cybersecurity, change-management, segregation-of-duties, and regulatory requirements.

Observability, Automation, and Cloud Engineering

• Define the enterprise observability strategy for supported services, including standards for telemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, logging, dashboards, alerting, dependency mapping, and customer-experience monitoring.

• Govern the effective implementation and use of Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and other approved enterprise tools.

• Drive standardization of telemetry and observability patterns across cloud-native, hybrid, distributed, and legacy environments.

• Establish expectations for actionable alerts, signal quality, service-health visibility, release observability, and real-time operational insight.

• Reduce alert fatigue and operational noise by improving monitoring coverage, alert thresholds, routing, correlation, suppression, ownership, and automation.

• Sponsor reusable dashboards, instrumentation patterns, automation libraries, reference architectures, and reliability controls.

• Develop and execute a strategy to reduce operational toil through automation, self-service capabilities, automated recovery, and self-healing solutions.

• Establish measurable toil-reduction goals and ensure reclaimed engineering capacity is redirected toward reliability, automation, and product improvements.

• Promote Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and other approved technologies to improve repeatability, control, recoverability, and environment consistency.

• Partner with Azure and enterprise platform teams to improve scalability, resiliency, deployment safety, lifecycle management, and operational controls.

Incident, Problem, and Resiliency Management

• Provide leadership and executive coordination during significant technology incidents affecting customers, critical business services, or enterprise operations.

• Ensure appropriate technical leadership, stakeholder communication, escalation, decision-making, and recovery focus during high-severity events.

• Partner with incident management, technology operations, application teams, infrastructure teams, and business leaders to minimize customer impact and restore services safely.

• Establish expectations for timely, objective, and technically rigorous Root Cause Analysis.

• Ensure corrective and preventive actions address underlying technical, process, monitoring, testing, release, deployment, architecture, and organizational causes.

• Track material reliability actions to completion and escalate overdue or inadequately addressed risks.

• Analyze incident, change, deployment, and operational telemetry to identify recurring failure patterns and enterprise-level improvement opportunities.

• Sponsor proactive problem-management efforts that reduce repeat incidents and improve service stability.

• Establish standards for resiliency testing, fault-tolerance validation, performance testing, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and recovery automation.

• Promote game days, controlled failure testing, and other approved validation methods to test service behavior and organizational readiness.

• Partner with technology resiliency and continuity teams to ensure recovery capabilities meet applicable business and regulatory requirements.

• Ensure lessons from incidents, failed changes, deployment events, and resiliency exercises are incorporated into engineering standards, training, tooling, and future designs.

• Communicate material reliability risks, customer impacts, remediation strategies, and progress to senior management and governance bodies.

Program and Portfolio Management

• Manage a portfolio of SRE initiatives and Forward Deployed SRE engagements spanning multiple lines of business, platforms, applications, and technology domains.

• Establish portfolio governance, delivery cadences, health reporting, dependency management, escalation paths, and outcome tracking.

• Provide direction and oversight to program managers responsible for planning, sequencing, coordinating, and reporting SRE initiatives.

• Define measurable objectives, key results, milestones, and success criteria for the SRE Center of Excellence and Forward Deployed SRE program.

• Monitor execution against approved roadmaps, budgets, commitments, capacity, risk tolerances, and benefit expectations.

• Resolve delivery barriers that span organizational boundaries and escalate decisions requiring senior leadership involvement.

• Establish demand-management and capacity-planning processes for SRE services.

• Prioritize investments based on customer impact, operational risk, service criticality, strategic alignment, regulatory considerations, and measurable reliability benefit.

• Develop business cases for staffing, tooling, platform capabilities, release engineering, automation, observability, and engineering transformation.

• Manage applicable budgets, forecasts, vendor relationships, contracts, licensing requirements, and financial commitments.

• Demonstrate the value of SRE investments through measurable improvements in operational performance, customer experience, risk reduction, release quality, and engineering productivity.

Stakeholder and Executive Leadership

• Build trusted partnerships with senior leaders across application engineering, infrastructure, cloud, platform engineering, architecture, cybersecurity, technology operations, risk, audit, and business-aligned technology organizations.

• Advise technology and business leaders on reliability risks, service-health trends, engineering priorities, deployment risks, operational readiness, and investment decisions.

• Communicate complex technical issues, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations in language appropriate for technical, business, risk, and executive audiences.

• Present SRE strategy, operating metrics, program status, investment needs, material risks, and reliability outcomes to leadership and governance forums.

• Facilitate decisions where reliability, delivery speed, cost, customer impact, and operational risk must be balanced.

• Influence teams outside the direct reporting structure to adopt enterprise SRE standards and resolve cross-functional reliability concerns.

• Establish clear accountability among the SRE organization, product teams, service owners, platform teams, release teams, and technology operations.

• Use structured stakeholder feedback to continuously improve SRE services and engagement practices.

Risk, Controls, and Regulatory Responsibilities

• Understand and adhere to the Company’s risk and regulatory standards, policies, and controls in accordance with the Company’s Risk Appetite.

• Ensure SRE practices, tools, automation, release processes, and operating models comply with applicable technology, cybersecurity, data, privacy, resiliency, change-management, and third-party risk requirements.

• Identify, assess, document, and escalate material reliability, operational, technology, program, release, and control risks.

• Ensure appropriate preventive and detective controls are incorporated into SRE standards, automation, CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, observability solutions, and operational workflows.

• Maintain M&T internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit findings and regulatory requirements as applicable.

• Support examinations, audits, risk assessments, control testing, and remediation activities related to the SRE organization and supported services.

• Ensure risk acceptances, exceptions, and material reliability or deployment decisions are documented, approved, monitored, and escalated in accordance with Company requirements.

• Establish governance that provides transparency into unresolved reliability risks and associated remediation commitments.

• Complete other related duties as assigned.

Scope of Responsibilities

Supervisory and Managerial Responsibilities

• Manages an organization employees and contingent resources through direct reports, managers, program managers, technical leads, and matrixed delivery relationships.

• Directly manages a combination of people leaders, program managers, senior technical professionals, and other SRE personnel.

• Accountable for organizational design, staffing, recruiting, performance management, compensation recommendations, talent development, succession planning, employee engagement, and workforce capacity.

• Establishes priorities and allocates people and funding across the SRE Center of Excellence and Forward Deployed SRE portfolio.

• Provides leadership across multiple concurrent programs and technical engagements.

• Accountable for the quality, timeliness, control effectiveness, financial management, and measurable outcomes of work delivered by the organization.

• May manage employees and teams across multiple locations, technology domains, and organizational reporting structures.

Organizational Impact

• Influences reliability strategy, release engineering, engineering practices, and operational performance across multiple technology organizations.

• Decisions affect critical applications, business services, customer experience, operational risk, technology investment, delivery performance, and engineering productivity.

• Operates with significant autonomy while escalating material business, technology, customer, financial, regulatory, and operational risks.

• Regularly interacts with senior technology leaders, business stakeholders, risk partners, auditors, vendors, and enterprise governance bodies.

Education and Experience Required

• A combined minimum of 11 years’ higher education and/or work experience, including a minimum of 4 years’ engineering and/or architecture experience and 5 years’ leadership experience, including people management.

• Complete understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle and modern software delivery practices.

• Demonstrated leadership delivering enterprise-wide SRE, reliability engineering, production engineering, or comparable technology capabilities, including operating models and adoption mechanisms.

• Proven ownership of SDLC reliability and operational readiness controls, enforceable standards, templates, quality gates, and supporting evidence requirements.

• Experience establishing governance for SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, observability, release readiness, deployment safety, resiliency, and production operations.

• Experience with release and deployment orchestration, including progressive delivery practices such as blue-green deployments, canary releases, rolling deployments, feature flags, automated health validation, and rollback.

• Strong execution management skills, including prioritization, dependency management, resource planning, and institutionalizing solutions beyond direct involvement.

• Experience managing complex initiatives, large system enhancements, cloud or platform transformations, application conversions, and production issue resolution.

• Experience leading multidisciplinary engineering teams and coordinating delivery across application, infrastructure, platform, cloud, operations, risk, and business organizations.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with strong analytical, decision-making, negotiation, and organizational capabilities.

• Confidence leading multiple teams across geographies and time zones.

• Prior experience presenting technology strategy, delivery progress, operational performance, investment needs, and material risks to senior management.

Core Technical Requirements

• Strong understanding of SRE practices, including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, observability, incident and problem management, Root Cause Analysis, operational readiness, resiliency, capacity planning, and toil reduction.

• Strong understanding of cloud-native and hybrid architectures, distributed systems, APIs, containers, service dependencies, and Microsoft Azure.

• Experience leading observability capabilities using Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, or comparable technologies.

• Experience governing Infrastructure as Code, preferably using Terraform, and CI/CD pipeline practices.

• Understanding of automated regression, performance, resiliency, recovery, and post-deployment testing.

• Knowledge of release quality gates, traffic management, automated rollback, self-healing, high-availability, and disaster-recovery patterns.

• Ability to provide credible leadership to senior engineers and evaluate architectural proposals for reliability, release, and operational risks.

Education and Experience Preferred

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in engineering, computer science, information systems, business administration, or a related discipline.

• Minimum of 12 years of technology management or large program leadership experience.

• Experience leading an SRE Center of Excellence, production engineering organization, platform engineering function, or Forward Deployed SRE operating model.

• Hands-on familiarity with enterprise observability, incident management, service management, deployment orchestration, and engineering workflow platforms.

• Experience building reusable SRE capabilities, automation frameworks, deployment patterns, reference architectures, and self-service engineering solutions with multi-team and vendor coordination.

• Exposure to AI-assisted operations, AIOps, automated incident correlation, predictive analytics, performance engineering, or chaos engineering capabilities.

• Subject matter expertise in business-critical applications, distributed platforms, and integrated systems.

• Strong understanding of the Bank’s application framework, business plan, risk environment, and strategic objectives.

• Proven mentoring, coaching, organizational development, and enterprise leadership capabilities.

• Self-motivated leader with the ability to motivate and influence others across organizational boundaries.