Engineering Manager, SRE - remote job

Remote is hiring a Engineering Manager, SRE - a lead role, which means responsibility for a team or a direction. The role sits in IT and programming and is fully remote. The company hires candidates based in Europe.

The main tools named in the advert are: AWS, Kubernetes. Your CV should show concrete examples of exactly these skills.

The employer did not publish a figure; that is settled at interview. The employer asks for working hours that overlap the team's, which needs a schedule agreed up front.

This vacancy passed an automated check: the list excludes any advert requiring a foreign work permit, visa sponsorship, a particular citizenship, or residence in a specific country.

About Remote

Remote tackles the biggest challenge facing contemporary organizations—navigating global employment compliance effortlessly. Our platform enables businesses, regardless of size, to recruit, pay, and manage international teams with ease. Our team, grounded in core values and a forward-thinking culture, works tirelessly on complex problems, collaborating asynchronously from around the world. Remoteers are distributed across six continents (Antarctica is still out there for future expansion) and all roles are fully remote.

Innovation is a cornerstone at Remote, integrated into every role through Automation and AI capabilities.

We value every team member's talents, experiences, and cultural insights, encouraging their contributions to build the premier HR platform.

If you are energetic, curious, motivated, and ambitious, join our global community. Apply now to shape the future of work!

What This Role Offers

Remote’s SRE team ensures swift engineering movement and a continuously available product. They oversee Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, CI infrastructure, the observability stack, and overarching reliability practices.

We seek a Team Leader to lead this role. This position is 60% hands-on engineering and 40% leadership. You will guide your reports’ career paths, align team focus with company objectives, and act as a liaison with the engineering department. You will also keep a close watch on technical work to ensure credibility and early intervention in issues.

Remote’s reliability practices are maturing. Our SLO framework is operational on a few teams and needs to be extended. Balancing operational load with project delivery presents interesting challenges. If you’re drawn to foundational structures and unresolved complexities, this team is perfect.

What You Will Bring

People Leadership

- You have led an SRE, infrastructure, or platform engineering team, focusing on the growth, performance, and career advancement of your reports.

- You coach both technical and soft skills, with evidence of growth facilitated by your mentorship.

- You address underperformance promptly and with clarity and empathy.

- You have hired engineers and can differentiate between strong interview performances and talented engineers.

- You read team dynamics well and resolve conflicts effectively.

- You naturally foster commitment to the company’s goals.

Technical Depth

- A hands-on background in site reliability, DevOps, or cloud infrastructure engineering, deep enough to critically review your team's work, challenge designs, and contribute meaningfully during incidents.

- Experience with Kubernetes in production, including real-world operational challenges.

- Extensive experience with AWS at a significant scale.

- Proficiency in AI building, enablement, and scaling AI infrastructure.

- Strong observability practices and principles.

- Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.

- CI/CD systems such as GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.

- Docker and shell scripting expertise.

- Experience in reliability practices, including incident response, on-call rotations, SLOs, and error budgets.

- Familiarity with working in regulated environments.

Ways of Working

- You prioritize effectively when operational load and project work compete, and you protect your team's focus without compromising operational commitments.

- You communicate clearly, as Remote is fully distributed and operates asynchronously.

- You build relationships across teams, as much of SRE’s value comes from early intervention with problem-solving.

Nice to Have

- Working knowledge of a backend language, ideally Elixir, or Java, Clojure, Node.js, Python, or similar.

- Deep experience with modern observability tools like OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and tools such as Honeycomb.

- Database operations experience, particularly with PostgreSQL or Aurora, including performance tuning, connection pool health, and query optimization.

- Experience running and configuring Linux systems outside a cloud environment.

- Security expertise from both a defensive and offensive standpoint.

- Cloud cost management and FinOps knowledge.

- Experience growing a team from a small base, including building the hiring bar as you go.

Key Responsibilities

Your People

- The full career lifecycle of your reports, including onboarding, feedback, performance assessments, progression, and hiring.

- Team health, dynamics, and the retrospective habit that maintains accountability.

- Being the team’s spokesperson to the engineering and senior leadership teams.

Delivery

- SRE goals: defining, prioritizing, and communicating team commitments.

- Support rotation and on-call model.

The Platform

- Remote’s core infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, DNS and TLS, CI infrastructure.

- Reliability practices: SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and the observability stack.

- Partnership with the Security team on threats, patching, and infrastructure controls, including audit and compliance obligations.

- Vendor relationships and commercial conversations, supported by your Director.

Reporting

- You will report to: Director of Engineering, Platform.

- Team: Site Reliability Engineering, part of Platform Engineering.

- Direct reports: 4.

- Location: You can work anywhere in the world. Our current coverage is strongest in EMEA and APAC, so candidates who can help us in the Americas are especially welcome.

- Start date: As soon as possible.

Application Process

- Initial interview with the recruiter.

- Interview with the hiring manager.

- Scenario interview with a peer team leader.

- Executive interview.

- Bar Raiser interview.

- Offer and prior employment verification check.

Remote’s Total Rewards philosophy centers on fair, unbiased compensation and equitable pay, ensuring competitive benefits in all operating locations. We do not support cheap-labor practices, aiming to pay above local rates and inspire other companies to support global talent hiring and bring local wealth to developing countries.

At a glance, our salary bands might appear broad. Remote operates internationally with a globally distributed workforce. We use geographic ranges to account for regional pay disparities as part of our global compensation strategy. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The actual base pay for a successful candidate depends on various factors, including location, transferable or job-related skills, work experience, relevant training, business needs, and market demands. The base salary range may be adjusted.

Remote values internal mobility as a core element of our culture, supported by a compensation philosophy that ensures pay equity and fairness. All compensation changes associated with internal moves will be reviewed by the Total Rewards & People Enablement team on a case-by-case basis.

The annual salary range for this full-time position is $75,450-$169,700 USD.

Benefits

For detailed information on our benefits and perks, refer to our handbook at remote.com/r/benefits. Some benefits are universal for all Remote employees:

- Work from anywhere.

- Flexible paid time off.

- Flexible working hours (asynchronous).

- 16 weeks of paid parental leave.

- Budget for co-working spaces, learning, and wellness, including gym memberships.

- Mental health support services.

- Stock options.