Position Title: Systems Engineering Manager, SRE & DevOps
Location: HOUSTON, TX
FLSA Class: EXEMPT
Responsible to: Director of Software Engineering
Position Summary: Manager of Systems Engineering to lead a small, high-impact DevOps/SRE team. This is a split role - you'll split your time between hands-on infrastructure work and growing a team of 3-5 engineers. You'll set technical direction for reliability and infrastructure while building a healthy, high-performing team culture.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 3-5 DevOps/SRE engineers
- Contribute hands-on to infrastructure design, tooling, and incident response alongside your team
- Set technical direction for cloud infrastructure, on-prem Linux environments, virtualization, deployment pipelines, and reliability practices
- Drive adoption of SLI/SLO frameworks and operational maturity across the engineering organization
- Partner with engineering leadership and product teams on capacity planning, roadmap prioritization, and production readiness
- Own team processes - sprint planning, on-call rotations, postmortem culture, and knowledge sharing
- Hire and onboard new team members as the team grows
- Balance technical debt reduction with feature delivery and reliability investments
- Represent the infrastructure team in cross-functional planning and incident escalations
Other Requirements:- 6+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering, with at least 1-2 years in a technical leadership or management capacity
- Demonstrated ability to manage, mentor, and develop engineers
- Strong hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure AWS preferred)
- Production experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration
- Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent)
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
- Solid understanding of monitoring, observability, and alerting systems (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar)
- Strong Linux systems administration background (Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, or similar)
- Experience with virtualization platforms including VM provisioning, storage, networking, and cluster management
- Strong communication skills - able to translate infrastructure concerns into business impact for non-technical stakeholders
- Experience with incident management, postmortems, and on-call processes
Nice to Have:- Experience scaling a team through a period of growth
- Background in platform engineering or internal developer experience initiatives
- Experience with budgeting and cost optimization for cloud infrastructure
- Prior experience in a split role balancing IC work and management
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by employees assigned to this classification. All personnel may be required to perform duties outside of their normal responsibilities from time to time, as needed.
