Director of Engineering Excellence & Reliability

About Us:

CDK Global is a leading provider of cloud-based software to dealerships and Original Equipment Manufacturers (“OEMs”) across automotive and related industries. The Company’s cloud-based, software as a service (“SaaS”) platform enables dealerships to manage their end-to-end business operations including the acquisition, sale, financing, insuring, repair, and maintenance of vehicles. By automating and streamlining critical workflows, the integrated platform of modern solutions enables dealers to sell and service more vehicles by creating simple and convenient experiences for customers and improves their financial and operational performance. Visit www.cdkglobal.com

At CDK Global, we are focused on connections that allow us to deliver world-class software, support, and data insights. Our values define who we are and how we show up for each other, our customers, and our communities. Our values: Stay Curious, Own It, Be Open, Create Possibilities.

The Role:

We are seeking a transformational Director of Engineering Excellence & Reliability to establish and scale our Product SRE capabilities while driving organizational engineering maturity. Walking in the door, this leader will focus on building world-class Product SRE practices from the ground up—we have a significant opportunity to implement product-focused Site Reliability Engineering that will strengthen our system reliability and reduce production incidents.   
This role is mission-critical in driving measurable engineering productivity gains, system reliability, and strategic tooling governance – including AI capabilities. This individual ideally brings proven experience as a high-impact execution leader, ability to drive organizational change, increase engineering maturity, and deliver technical programs at scale.  Ideal technical background includes prior hands-on development, with specific product-side reliability engineering experience.
You'll have the opportunity to architect reliability principles directly into our product development lifecycle and make a significant organizational impact! In addition to pioneering our Product SRE function, you'll mature our Centers of Excellence across Systems Engineering, DevSecOps, Release Engineering, and Engineering Metrics. You'll drive measurable engineering productivity improvements, establish strategic tooling governance (including emerging AI capabilities), and cultivate a culture of engineering excellence. We're seeking an execution-focused leader who has successfully scaled Product SRE practices in complex, multi-product environments and is excited to build something transformational.
Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

Engineering Productivity & Maturity

• Lead initiatives to improve developer productivity across the organization—simplifying workflows, reducing cognitive load, and improving tool and platform efficiency.
• Develop and execute engineering maturity models that benchmark teams and guide them through improvements in automation, observability, incident response, test strategy, and deployment readiness.
• Identify systemic bottlenecks and lead cross-functional efforts to remove them, driving measurable gains in engineering velocity and quality.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership to embed productivity metrics and maturity targets into quarterly planning cycles.

Product SRE & Systems Engineering

• Champion Site Reliability Engineering principles across the organization—implementing SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to manage system reliability effectively.
• Guide Systems Engineering best practices across scalability, observability, automation, and cost optimization.

Leadership & Strategic Execution

• Define, own, and deliver the strategy and roadmap for multiple COEs: Product SRE, Systems Engineering, DevSecOps, Release Engineering, and Engineering Metrics.
• Align COE deliverables with organizational priorities, and ensure consistent execution through KPIs, OKRs, and milestone tracking.
• Build and lead high-performing teams that deliver reliable, scalable, and secure engineering platforms and practices.
• Act as a transformation agent—establishing execution frameworks that scale across business units and geographies.

Engineering Metrics & KPI Reporting

• Establish and standardize engineering performance metrics, including but not limited to DORA metrics, MTTR, Team & Developer Productivity.
• Build dashboards and reporting frameworks that provide visibility into organizational health and enable data-driven decision-making.
• Drive adoption of metrics across teams to reinforce accountability, continuous improvement, and transparency.

DevSecOps & Release Engineering

• Oversee the development and scaling of CI/CD pipelines using Harness that are secure, automated, and optimized for frequent and stable deployments.
• Embed DevSecOps principles into every stage of the SDLC and across infrastructure provisioning and Infra capacity management practices.
• Lead and mature Release Engineering practices to ensure release integrity, rollback safety, and compliance.

AI Tools Governance

• Lead the governance of AI/ML tooling in software development, ensuring compliance, risk mitigation, and alignment with enterprise strategy.
• Define safe adoption pathways and provide guidance on tool integration, monitoring, and impact evaluation.

Required Qualifications and Attributes:

• 10+ years of progressive engineering leadership experience, with at least 2–3 years at the director level or equivalent.
• Proven track record in delivering engineering productivity, tooling, or platform transformation initiatives with measurable results.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architectures, CI/CD, observability, automation, and modern DevOps/SRE practices.
• Demonstrated success building and operationalizing technical governance and engineering maturity frameworks.
• Strong strategic mindset combined with tactical execution skills; thrives in high-change, high-growth environments.
• Exceptional communicator with the ability to influence across engineering, product, EIT and executive teams.

Preferred Qualifications & Attributes: