Director, Site Reliability Engineering

About Invoca:

Invoca is the industry leader and innovator in AI and machine learning-powered Conversation Intelligence. With over 300 employees, 2,000+ customers, and $100M in revenue, there are tremendous opportunities to continue growing the business. We are building a world-class SaaS company and have raised over $184M from leading venture capitalists including Upfront Ventures, Accel, Silver Lake Waterman, H.I.G. Growth Partners, and Salesforce Ventures. Our customers include some of the world’s largest consumer brands across multiple verticals such as healthcare, automotive, insurance, telecommunications, and many more.

About the group:

Reliability Engineering is Invoca's foundation. We provide the infrastructure, tools, and observability for Invoca to build whatever is needed. We ensure stability today and enable growth for tomorrow.

SRE is organized around two main areas:

• Consulting
• Responsible for short-term, interrupt-driven requests and engagements with software development teams, helping develop longer term solutions to shift left and providing development teams with greater confidence and ownership of their infrastructure needs.
• Core
• Responsible for day-to-day service ownership and providing Invoca with a reliable and innovative foundation through expertise, ownership, and advancement of infrastructure.

Holistically, the SRE Group is responsible for production uptime and observability across dimensions of cost, performance, and analytics. We support Invoca’s mission by providing realtime, highly-available infrastructure for call routing, audio processing, transcription, data storage, numerous APIs, and more. Invoca is a B2B platform and our external customers rely on us to be a seamless part of their conversations with customers, provide timely insights and analytics, and do it all securely, at scale, across the US and EU.

Invoca takes a balanced approach to engineer on-call requirements and believes strongly in service ownership, allowing engineering teams to have autonomy and accountability for the amazing things they build. This means engineering teams are on-call 24/7 for their service areas, including product development and SRE teams. Leadership acts as an escalation point for their team and is expected to participate in the incident commander on-call rotation approximately two days per month.

The position’s reporting structure is:  Director, SRE -> Director, Infrastructure & Security -> CTO -> CEO

Role and responsibilities

Key characteristics

You are a former SRE, DevOps engineer, infrastructure architect, or infrastructure-focused software engineer with significant management experience, particularly in a realtime-focused environment. You’re encouraged to apply if you live by reliability engineering principles and can advocate for better practices on your team and in the wider engineering organization.

Requirements and competencies

Proficiency

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in an SRE, DevOps, sysadmin, or infrastructure engineering role
• Have strong opinions coupled with an open mind for infrastructure design, architecture, and automation based on organizational context, experience, and industry practices
• Ability to use understanding of both established systems and general industry direction to help guide strategic decisions
• A breadth of knowledge and best practices in various core infrastructure technologies, particularly those in use at Invoca or similar:
• Cloud computing fundamentals, particularly in AWS & GCP
• Containerization, specifically Docker and Kubernetes via kops
• Linux, especially Debian
• Configuration management tooling, particularly Chef
• Observability tooling, we use Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos, Karma, and ELK
• Telephony with SIP, FreeSWITCH, and Kamailio
• Other ownership areas include Kafka, Consul, MySQL

Communication

• Ability to successfully work and manage in a remote-first and asynchronous communication culture
• Ability to coordinate complex technical projects while providing high-level progress updates in clear, business-friendly terms

Problem Solving

• Can reliably and quickly diagnose problems with people, process, and technology, find agreement, and drive to resolution
• Ability to ask good questions, get to decisions, stay curious, and promote psychological safety

Execution

• Help the team clarify and break down larger problems along with defining constraints to leverage their technical expertise when designing and implementing solutions
• Use metrics, data, and your team’s collective experience to drive development decisions and maximize value/ROI, reduce risk, and deliver with a high bar for quality

Personal Leadership

• Display a strong sense of operational excellence, ownership for your services, and production uptime
• Ability to set high standards coupled with deep devotion for your team’s success
• Ability to promote a culture of understanding, learning, support, quality, and reliability

Management

• 3+ years of experience directly managing SRE, DevOps, sysadmin, or other infrastructure teams
• Significant experience as a hiring manager
• Experience building, staffing, and maintaining high-performing engineering teams

What you will do:

• Provide direct management to an SRE Tech Lead and a team of 8-10 direct reports across two teams
• Build capabilities in your engineers to meet the requirements and competencies of their role
• Organize the team around solving challenging problems presented by the team and the business
• Draft, evolve, and communicate process, strategy, vision, and goals
• Assist or own vendor management for infrastructure and platform tools
• Apply a build/borrow/buy framework to technology decisions
• Assist with compliance auditing activities for PCI, SOC, and ISO
• Set standards and policies for infrastructure usage across the engineering org
• Solicit feedback from internal customers on infrastructure challenges and opportunities
• Organize and facilitate work in 2-week sprints, initiatives, epics, and stories
• Own the post-incident work process for the team to improve following incidents in our service area
• Administrative work and facilitation for the team
• Participate in an incident commander on-call rotation approximately two days per month

Recent work we’ve completed:

• A multi-version upgrade of MySQL including improvements in launch automation with minimal downtime, meeting compliance goals and providing new features for software development teams.
• Launching the Invoca platform in the EU to meet long-term business goals and comply with data residency requirements for non-US customers.
• Building out ArgoCD providing development teams with self-service changes to alerts in production, removing SRE as a rubber-stamper and reducing manual change requests.
• Removing legacy infrastructure, including a deprecated product platform and legacy observability tooling.
• Understand and reduce wasteful infrastructure spending as part of a larger organizational focus on COGS with a direct positive impact on our budget and wider improvements in the Engineering org.

This role is remote and open to candidates located in the United States and Canada only. Please note that we are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position.

Salary, Benefits & Perks:

Teammates are eligible to begin receiving benefits on the first day of the month following or coinciding with one month of continuous employment. Below are some of our offerings:

• Paid Time Off - Invoca encourages a work-life balance for our employees. We have an outstanding PTO policy, starting at 20 days off, for all full-time employees. We also offer 16 paid holidays, 10 days Compassionate Leave, 3 days volunteer time and more.
• Healthcare - Invoca offers a health care program that includes medical, dental and vision coverage. There are multiple plan options to choose from so you can make the best choice for yourself, partner and family.
• Retirement - Invoca offers a 401(k) plan through Fidelity with a company match of up to 4%.
• Stock options - All employees are invited to ownership in Invoca through stock options.
• Employee Assistance Program - Invoca offers well-being support on issues ranging from personal matters to everyday life topics through the WorkLifeMatters program.
• Paid Family Leave - Invoca offers up to six weeks 100% paid leave for baby bonding, adoption, and caring for family members
• Paid Medical Leave - Invoca offers up to twelve weeks 100% paid leave for childbirth and medical need
• Sabbatical - We thank our long-term team members with an additional week of PTO along with a bonus after 7 years of service.
• Wellness Subsidy - In further support of your well-being, Invoca provides a wellness subsidy that can be applied to a gym membership, fitness classes and more.
• Position Base Range - $190,000.00 - $300,000.00/year, plus bonus potential

Recently, we’ve noticed a rise in phishing attempts targeting individuals who are applying to our job postings. These fraudulent emails, posing as official communications from Invoca aim to deceive individuals into sharing sensitive information. These attacks have attempted to use our name and logo, and have tried to impersonate individuals from our HR team by claiming to represent Invoca. 

We will never ask you to send financial information or other sensitive information via email. 

DEI Statement

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal-opportunity workplace.

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