Lead Site Reliability Engineer

The Lead Site Reliability Engineer will be part of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. The SRE team drives reliability, observability, and engineering practice maturity across over 150 teams made up of over a thousand engineers in our part of Cox Automotive. We build processes, documentation, and tools that scale: deep observability to detect and diagnose issues faster, engineering maturity assessments that drive measurable improvement, reusable golden paths that accelerate delivery, and trusted advisory relationships that align reliability with business priorities. Much of our work focuses on eliminating toil through automation and establishing self-service capabilities that multiply our impact.
If you love building monitoring systems that reveal truth, evaluating engineering practices to raise the bar organization-wide, and acting as a trusted advisor to engineers and leadership, we want to talk to you.
As a Lead Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering at Cox Automotive you will:

• Define and drive adoption of SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and high-quality alerting standards across the organization
• Architect end-to-end observability strategies (metrics, logs, traces, business signals) with consistent taxonomy and discoverability
• Build centralized dashboards, reliability scorecards, and runbooks used by engineering teams and leadership
• Establish engineering practice maturity baselines and partner with teams on measurable improvement plans
• Create golden paths-standardized pipelines, infrastructure modules, and service templates-that enable rapid, consistent delivery
• Lead internal workshops, game days, and learning programs to spread operational excellence
• Act as a trusted advisor to product and engineering leadership, providing data-driven insights on reliability risk and trade-offs
• Guide post-incident reviews toward systemic remediation (guardrails, automation, design changes) rather than superficial fixes
• Design and extend self-service platforms for deployment, progressive delivery, and automated recovery
• Reduce MTTR through better telemetry, automation, and resilience patterns
• Mentor engineers across teams to become local reliability champions, scaling SRE impact without adding headcount

Qualifications:

• Experience programming in at least one of the following languages: Python, Typescript, or Java.
• Bachelor's degree in a related discipline and 6 years' experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master's degree and 4 years' experience; a Ph.D. and 1 year of experience; or 18 years' experience in a related field.
• Applicants must currently be authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future sponsorship. No OPT, CPT, STEM/OPT or visa sponsorship now or in future.
• Expertise in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with modern observability tools (CloudWatch and NewRelic)
• Proven ability to assess engineering practices and drive measurable improvements across multiple teams.
• Experience establishing SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, and improving alert signal-to-noise ratios.
• Strong background in release engineering, CI/CD, and progressive deployment strategies.
• Deep expertise in AWS, Terraform, AWS CDK, and GitHub/GitHub Actions.
• Track record reducing MTTR and improving availability through automation and architectural improvements.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills tailored to both engineers and executives.
• Systematic problem-solving approach with a sense of drive and ownership.
• Understanding of Linux operating systems, networking, and performance fundamentals.
• Ability to build trust and influence decisions through data-driven insights.
• Experience facilitating effective post-incident analysis and driving systemic remediation.
• Desire to work in a fast-paced, evolving, growing, dynamic environment.

USD 119,600.00 - 199,400.00 per year
Compensation:
Compensation includes a base salary of $119,600.00 - $199,400.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate's knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.
Benefits:
The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company's needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.