Director of Site Reliability Engineering

**Stellar** Director of Site Reliability Engineering; $210,000 – $310,000 + lumen-denominated grants; New York / San Francisco (Hybrid)

**About Company** Stellar is a decentralized, public blockchain that gives developers the tools to create experiences that are more like cash than crypto. The network is faster, cheaper, and far more energy-efficient than most blockchain-based systems. It's designed so Stellar's ecosystem can make a real-world, lasting impact.

Since 2014, the mission-driven team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has helped fuel the growth of the Stellar network, an open-source platform that operates at high scale today. Developers and companies around the world build on it, and SDF is expanding to support the rapidly growing Stellar ecosystem.

**About the Role** SDF is hiring a Director of Site Reliability Engineering to lead its SRE team of 4 and shape how engineering teams own, operate, and improve production services. This is a backfill, reporting directly to the CTO.

The Director sets the vision, operating model, and culture for SRE while owning the core infrastructure services that help SDF engineering teams build, deploy, observe, and operate software with confidence. Engineering teams at SDF own the services they build; SRE provides the frameworks, standards, shared infrastructure, tooling, observability practices, and enablement model that make strong service ownership possible.

This is a hands-on leadership role at a small, mission-driven foundation with a broad technical surface area. Success takes leverage, ownership, and a bias toward solving the right problems over creating process for its own sake.

**Responsibilities** - Lead, coach, and develop a distributed SRE team, setting a clear vision, charter, operating model, priorities, and success measures - Define and roll out a Service Ownership & Maturity Framework across engineering, with expectations that vary by service criticality - Own and improve core engineering infrastructure: cloud foundations, Kubernetes and compute patterns, CI/CD, observability, secrets management, GitHub workflows, and infrastructure automation - Help engineering teams become stronger owners and operators through better standards, dashboards, runbooks, alerting, escalation paths, operational readiness, and deployment practices - Make reliability, operational maturity, infrastructure health, and developer productivity measurable through trusted metrics - Improve deployment automation, resilience, self-healing patterns, and disaster recovery readiness based on actual impact and risk - Mature incident response, escalation, postmortems, and on-call health across a geographically distributed team - Build paved paths and self-service infrastructure that reduce toil and help engineering teams move faster - Partner with Security, Compliance, Legal, Finance, Procurement, and Corporate IT where infrastructure, access management, vendor review, or controls intersect with engineering - Pragmatically evaluate AI-assisted and agentic workflows for infrastructure operations, developer workflows, and toil reduction

**Required Skills** A. 10+ years in SRE, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, or production operations B. 5+ years leading, managing, or formally developing infrastructure, SRE, platform, or reliability engineers C. Experience defining team charters, operating models, roadmaps, and success measures for infrastructure or reliability teams D. 3+ years with modern cloud infrastructure in AWS, GCP, or similar E. 3+ years with Kubernetes, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and deployment safety F. Strong experience with observability, monitoring, alerting, SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, and on-call practices G. Experience helping product or application engineering teams improve service ownership and operational readiness H. Still somewhat hands-on technically I. Clear executive communication and the ability to partner directly with a CTO

**Bonus Skills** - Experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or platform work in a lean, high-agency organization - Experience supporting globally distributed teams or 24/7 operational coverage - Experience improving developer productivity through paved paths, self-service infrastructure, and reduced toil - Infrastructure security fundamentals, secrets management, access controls, or compliance-related controls - Financial services, regulated environments, blockchain, crypto, Web3, or other high-reliability ecosystems - Experience evaluating vendors and infrastructure platforms with technical rigor and cost discipline - Practical experience applying AI-assisted or agentic workflows to infrastructure, reliability, or operations

**Logistical Info** - **Location:** NYC or SF, hybrid. In-person 3 days a week if in NYC/SF, 1 day a week if within 30 miles of the city. Visa transfer or TN visa is possible; no fresh visa or OPT - **Compensation:** $210,000 – $310,000 base depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location, plus lumen-denominated grants - **Other:** Team of 4 SREs; health, dental and vision (most plans covered at 100% for employee and dependents); flexible time off plus 15 company holidays; 401K with 4% match; $250/month commuter benefit; $80/month gym reimbursement; $1,500/year L&D budget; daily lunch and snacks in office; company retreats

**Ideal Background** Mid-sized companies are where candidates find the most success at SDF. Larger organizations are fine, but mid-sized is the sweet spot. Blockchain experience is a nice-to-have, not a requirement. The client places real weight on candidates who have already adopted AI into their day-to-day workstreams, even if recently.

**Green Flags** - Has adopted AI into infrastructure or operations workstreams - Hands-on technical leader who fits an "all hands on deck" culture

**Red Flags** - No hands-on technical involvement; the role expects the Director to stay somewhat hands-on

**Interview Process** 1. Recruiter Screen 2. Hiring Manager Video Interview 3. Panel 1 (virtual): SRE-focused interview, no coding 4. Panel 1 (virtual): Security-focused interview, no coding 5. Panel 1 (virtual): Engineering-focused interview, no coding 6. Panel 2 (in person): CTO 7. Panel 2 (in person): Lunch with the team