Executive Director - SRE/Platform Strategy & Governance (Chicago)

Executive Director – SRE/Platform Strategy & Governance Salary: $250,000 to $270,000 Location: Chicago, ILTravel: 0%Job Categories:Infrastructure ManagementVisa Requirement:US Citizenship / Permanent ResidentBase Salary: $250,000 to $270,000Recruiter Name: Dillon GroossRecruiter Email: View email address on apply.placed-app.com#gform_wrapper_3[data-form-index=0].gform-theme,[data-parent-form=3_0]{}Apply to Job* indicates required fieldsFacebookThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.Name* First Last Email*MessageResume UploadMax. file size: 256 MB.CAPTCHAYou can apply to this job and others using your online resume. Click the link below to submit your online resume and email your application to this employer.OverviewA financial services company in Chicago is hiring an Executive Director – SRE/Platform Strategy & Governance. The director will manage a team of SRE’s for platform engineering governance, compliance, and site reliability. The director will focus on AWS cloud, Kubernetes, Kafka, FinOps, and SecOps within platform services.Responsibilities:· Lead the scaling and maturation of the SRE practice, establishing error budgets, SLOs, SLAs, and incident response frameworks across all platform services.· Define and enforce reliability standards including on-call models, blameless postmortem processes, and corrective action tracking to drive continuous improvement.· Partner with Platform Foundation teams (Kubernetes, Kafka, FinOps/Security) to embed reliability principles into build and operate models.· Serve as Product Manager for the FinOps and SecOps domains within Platform Engineering, owning the product vision, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment for governance tooling and practices.· Establish and maintain a governance framework ensuring Platform Engineering adheres to organizational standards across incident and problem management, SORTs, risk tracking, and audit findings.· Own the end-to-end process for PE compliance obligations, ensuring timely resolution and closure of incidents, problem tickets, risk items, and audit observations with clear accountability and tracking.· Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Security functions to proactively identify governance gaps, drive remediation, and ensure PE operates within the organization’s risk appetite.· Lead the scaling and maturation of the SRE practice, establishing error budgets, SLOs, SLAs, and incident response frameworks across all platform services.· Define and enforce reliability standards including on-call models, blameless postmortem processes, and corrective action tracking to drive continuous improvement.· Partner with Platform Engineering Product teams (Kubernetes, Kafka, FinOps/Security) to embed reliability principles into build and operate models.· Define and execute the multi-year cloud architecture strategy aligned to business growth, scalability, regulatory compliance, and cost optimization goals.· Establish cloud architectural standards, reference architectures, and governance frameworks (landing zones, identity, network patterns, service catalog) and drive adoption across engineering.· Guide cloud-native architecture decisions including containers/orchestration, IaaS/PaaS adoption, disaster recovery, and multi-region patterns with a steady eye on regulatory requirements (e.g., CIS, NIST).· Serve as a key technical advisor to senior leadership, translating complex architectural trade-offs into clear business decisions.Qualifications:· Bachelor’s degree, preferably in a technical discipline (Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or related field), or equivalent combination of education and experience.· 15+ years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, platform reliability, or infrastructure roles with at least 5 years in senior engineering leadership.· Proven executive-level leadership of SRE, cloud engineering, or platform reliability organizations in a regulated industry environment.· Demonstrated ability to build and scale SRE practices including SLO/SLA frameworks, on-call models, error budgets, and incident response programs.· Deep expertise in cloud architecture strategy and governance, with experience defining and driving enterprise-wide architectural standards.· Demonstrated experience serving in a Product Manager capacity for technical domains such as FinOps, SecOps, or platform tooling, including ownership of roadmap, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment.· Experience establishing and managing governance and compliance frameworks within a platform or infrastructure engineering organization, including oversight of incidents, problem management, risk items, and audit obligations.· Ability to design and maintain metrics and reporting frameworks that provide meaningful visibility into platform health, engineering performance, and compliance posture.· Deep knowledge of SRE tooling and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty, Datadog, or equivalents).· Expert-level knowledge of cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, or GCP; experience with multi-cloud or hybrid environments preferred.· Strong working knowledge of cloud-native architecture patterns and Infrastructure as Code principles.· Familiarity with container orchestration and streaming platforms (Kubernetes, Kafka) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalents).· Experience with metrics and reporting platforms; ability to design KPI frameworks and reporting dashboards for both technical and executive audiences.· Working knowledge of FinOps principles and cloud cost governance, with experience driving cost transparency and optimization at an organizational level.· Familiarity with SecOps tooling and security governance practices within a cloud or platform engineering context.Tagged as: AWS, cloud engineering, finops, kafka, kubernetes, platform engineering, secops, SRERelated JobsManager of DevOps Operational SupportChicago, ILFull TimePosted 1 day agoInfrastructure Director – IaC, Azure DevOps, Containerization, TerraformChicago, ILFull TimePosted 3 weeks agoSenior Lead Infrastructure EngineerCoppell, TXFull TimePosted 2 weeks ago