Director, Site Reliability Engineering

About EarnIn

As one of the first pioneers of earned wage access, our passion at EarnIn is building products that deliver real-time financial flexibility for those with the unique needs of living paycheck to paycheck. Our community members access their earnings as they earn them, with options to spend, save, and grow their money without mandatory fees, interest rates, or credit checks.

We’re fortunate to have an incredibly experienced leadership team, combined with world-class funding partners like A16Z, Matrix Partners, DST, Ribbit Capital, and a very healthy core business with a tremendous runway. We’re growing fast and are excited to continue bringing world-class talent onboard to help shape the next chapter of our growth journey.

POSITION SUMMARY

The Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) will provide strategic leadership and technical direction for the reliability, scalability, and performance of our mission‑critical systems and services. This role combines deep SRE expertise with strong engineering leadership to drive organizational transformation toward reliability-first principles. The ideal candidate brings a strong software engineering foundation, a passion for automation, and a proven ability to develop and lead high‑performing teams.

The Director will partner with engineering, product, operations, and business stakeholders to design, deliver, and operate resilient, high‑availability systems that support our customers and business objectives at scale. The Mountain View base salary range for this full-time position is $315,000 to $385,000, plus equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. This is a hybrid position in Mountain View, requiring in-office work 2 days a week.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Drive organizational transformation toward SRE principles and own the strategic direction for reliability maturity, cultivating a culture centered on reliability, efficiency, and continuous improvement.

• Develop and oversee automation strategies, tools, and frameworks that improve system reliability, reduce operational toil, and enhance team productivity.

• Architect and evolve robust observability, monitoring, and alerting systems; champion chaos engineering and resilience testing practices to proactively validate system behavior under failure conditions.

• Partner with engineering, product, and operations teams to embed SRE practices throughout the development lifecycle and influence architectural decisions for reliability.

• Build, mentor, and develop a high‑performing global SRE organization, fostering technical excellence, career growth, and a strong culture of knowledge sharing.

• Oversee capacity planning, scalability assessments, and future‑state demand forecasting across critical systems.

• Lead and govern high‑severity incident response practices—ensuring rapid triage, thorough root cause analysis, and follow‑through on corrective and preventative actions

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• BS, MS, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or related experience

• 7+ years of experience in the field, including 3+ years leading SRE teams or a team in a similar role.

• Strong experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and CI/CD pipelines.

• Hands-on experience with observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana) and incident management tools (e.g., incident.io, PagerDuty).

• Proficiency in at least one programming language (Python, Go, or Java) with the ability to review code and guide system design decisions.

• Proven experience in architecting and managing highly available, scalable, and fault-tolerant systems.

• Ability to define a clear reliability vision and inspire teams and stakeholders toward long‑term reliability goals.

• Demonstrated sound judgment and calm decision‑making under pressure, particularly during high‑severity incidents.

• Strong people leadership skills, with experience coaching and mentoring engineering talent, developing future leaders, and aligning peer engineering managers and leaders on reliability best practices.

• Strategic planning skills with a track record of aligning technical direction with organizational objectives.

• Excellent communication skills; able to translate complex technical issues into clear, actionable insights for executive and non‑technical audiences.

• Highly collaborative, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, operations, and business functions and leaders.

#LI-Hybrid

At EarnIn, we believe that the best way to build a financial system that works for everyday people is by hiring a team that represents our diverse community. Our team is diverse not only in background and experience but also in perspective. We celebrate our diversity and strive to create a culture of belonging. EarnIn does not unlawfully discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, legally protected medical condition, family care status, military or veteran status, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal laws. EarnIn is an E-Verify participant.

EarnIn does not accept unsolicited resumes from individual recruiters or third-party recruiting agencies in response to job postings. No fee will be paid to third parties who submit unsolicited candidates directly to our hiring managers or HR team.