Principal SRE

As an Executive Director of Site Reliability Engineering at JPMorgan Chase, you are viewed as a force multiplier on a firm level by promoting team members to unite through the sharing of information and joint problem solving across the organization. You guide your leaders and engineers, and entrust them to execute strategic business priorities while championing forward thinking and resiliency to drive change across mission-critical platforms. 

You set the direction for how reliability, scale, and performance are engineered into the firm's most important systems, and you translate that direction into outcomes by developing the people, partnerships, and operating practices that sustain it. You also personally hold — and hold your organization to — the firm's exemplary SRE technical standard. 

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES 

• Manages the development of all team members by ensuring they have access to the resources, sponsorship, and opportunities needed for their unique growth as engineers, managers, and leaders. 

• Collaborates across the firm to align team members with internal mobility opportunities that match their career aspirations, strengthening both the individual and the wider SRE community. 

• Applies a wide range of tactics and strategies to guide internal executive decisions — reliability posture, investment trade-offs, risk acceptance, architectural direction — to achieve substantial, firmwide goals. 

• Manages multiple senior stakeholders, complex programs, and distributed teams simultaneously, keeping delivery, reliability, and people outcomes in balance. 

• Implements innovative methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for the projects and people working on the most highly complex business and technology issues, raising the bar for how the firm measures and improves reliability. 

• Leads complex, cross-line-of-business initiatives spanning SRE design, scaling, resilience, and system performance assessments for mission-critical systems in production. 

• Champions a culture of innovation, learning, and change — normalizing blameless post-mortems, engineering rigor, and continuous improvement — so reliability practices evolve as fast as the platforms they support. 

• Owns the SRE technical bar within the organization: acts as (or sponsors) Bar Raisers, defends hiring and promotion standards, and ensures the four firmwide SRE competencies below are lived, not just documented. 

SRE COMPETENCIES 

At the SREM05 tier, you personally clear, and organizationally enforce, the four SRE technical competencies used firmwide to decide who is qualified to carry the Site Reliability Engineering title. 

1. Applied Architecture & Systems Design 

Develops, articulates, and maintains architecture design, policies, standards, governance, and controls that align technology to business strategy across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure — with particular focus on observability, data, and core SRE concepts. 

• Fluent in SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and disciplined about how they guide product, reliability, and investment decisions. 

• Sets and enforces resilient coding practices alongside resilient architecture. 

• Treats configuration-as-code as a first-class design standard. 

• Navigates the cost / feature / reliability trade-off with executive stakeholders — including where a 100% SLO is the wrong target. 

• Ensures the full incident-management lifecycle is designed for, not just reacted to. 

2. Automation & Continuous Delivery 

Articulates and applies systems architecture and automation technologies to support and implement automation, optimization, and CI/CD initiatives. 

• Maintains hands-on credibility in at least one programming or scripting language. 

• Sustains an automation-first mindset: toil is identified, quantified, and eliminated as an engineered outcome — not an aspiration. 

• Holds the organization to modern Git / version-control discipline and branching strategy. 

• Demands rigorous unit, functional, and performance testing integrated into CI/CD. 

• Champions mature Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment pipelines across the SDLC. 

3. Distributed Systems Design & Development 

Builds distributed systems that increase performance and reduce time to completion, maintaining continuous knowledge of best practices across networking, operating systems, resilient application design, and application architecture patterns — including multi-cloud and ERP techniques. 

• Frames reliability as more than uptime: performance-to-expectations, user experience, and backup / recovery. 

• Applies microservices, container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), and code-level redundancy as design defaults. 

• Applies load balancing and capacity planning correctly in scalable system design. 

• Requires resilient application design patterns for downstream-dependency failure, intermittent 5xx behavior, and graceful degradation. 

• Reasons through cost, resiliency, capacity, and latency trade-offs at global scale (e.g., 99.99% availability across geographies and peak load). 

4. Operational Management & Systems Troubleshooting 

Uses monitoring, observability, and integration facilities across applications, databases, and platforms to create a single seamless operating system, and applies design patterns to mitigate recurring problems. 

• Ensures every layer — networking, web, application, database — is treated as a candidate point of failure (data center / AZ, network, capacity, load balancer, database) and instrumented accordingly. 

• Backs teams up with the system-level commands, tooling, and telemetry needed to triage slow or degraded production systems. 

• Drives the right blend of Real User Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring. 

• Champions distributed-system troubleshooting across multiple data centers and environments. 

• Institutionalizes blameless post-mortems and mature incident management, and uses  

• Applies SLIs for proactive — not merely reactive — monitoring. 

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS, CAPABILITIES, AND SKILLS 

• Demonstrated experience leading technologists to manage, anticipate, and solve complex technological issues firmwide. 

• Track record of influencing team culture by championing innovation and change at scale. 

• Proven experience hiring, developing, and recognizing talent, and building durable pipelines of engineering and leadership capability. 

• Prior experience influencing across highly matrixed, complex organizations and delivering value at scale, including navigating competing executive priorities to a coherent outcome. 

• Experience leading complex projects supporting SRE design, scaling, resilience, and system performance assessments. 

• Experience managing multiple stakeholders, complex projects, and teams, with the judgment to know when to guide, when to entrust, and when to intervene. 

• Meets the firm's SREM05 Bar Raiser standard across all four SRE competencies, and is credible acting as a Bar Raiser for the discipline. 

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS, CAPABILITIES, AND SKILLS 

• Experience supporting mission-critical systems in a production environment, including accountability for availability, performance, and incident response outcomes at firm scale. 

• Prior service as an SRE Bar Raiser, or equivalent responsibility for setting and defending the technical standard of an engineering discipline.