Principal Site Reliability Engineering SRE

General Information

Location

Cary, North Carolina

Working Schedule

Full-Time

Work Arrangement

Hybrid

Travel Required

10%

Relocation Assistance Available

No

Grade

13T

Posted Date

13-Nov-2026

Job ID

21592

Description and Requirements

The Team You Will Join

When you join MetLife's Global Technology team, you'll be part of a forward-thinking group dedicated to shaping the future of digital solutions for customers worldwide. You'll develop, maintain and support technology applications and delivery, leveraging AI, automation, and contemporary ways of working to enhance experiences and drive business outcomes. Your work will simplify complex processes, improve tech resiliency, and ensure high-performing, seamless solutions that power life's most important moments. In this dynamic environment, you'll collaborate with talented peers across teams and functions, expanding your skills in impactful ways. Ready to push boundaries and set new industry standards? Join us and help drive the future of technology forward.

The Opportunity

The SRE function drives production stability and consistent reliability standards across applications and infrastructure. The team operates as a central capability with forward-deployed SREs embedded in production support organizations, partnering across Application, Infrastructure, and Vendor teams to improve observability, reduce risk, and enhance customer and employee experience.

As the Director, Site Reliability Engineering, you will be a hands-on technical leader who builds the foundation of the function. You will personally design and write the automation, monitoring, and engineering fixes that remove operational toil, and you will set the engineering standards and working patterns that SREs and application and infrastructure teams adopt. You will work directly alongside engineers across the organization, coaching through pairing, code review, and shared delivery, and you will lead the adoption of AI-driven operations. As the team grows, you will lead a hybrid model of central and embedded SREs while staying close to the technical work, so that production environments meet standards and continuously improve through automation and engineering-led practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and deliver production automation, self-healing, and engineering fixes in code that eliminate manual work and reduce L1 workload
• Design and implement monitoring, observability, and SLO standards as code across applications and infrastructure, reducing alert noise, improving signal quality, and minimizing manual triage effort
• Lead incident response and reviews hands-on, perform root cause analysis, and ensure recurring issues translate into the engineering backlog and long-term fixes
• Establish and run production readiness reviews, identifying gaps and driving remediation with app, infra, and vendor teams
• Implement and drive adoption of AI SRE solutions for anomaly detection, event correlation, and faster root cause analysis
• Partner with application, infrastructure, and vendor engineers to improve system design, resilience, and operability, contributing code and configuration directly
• Coach and enable engineers through pairing, code review, and reusable patterns, raising SRE capability across the organization
• Lead the central SRE team and govern forward-deployed SREs across application portfolios as the team grows
• Track and report on reliability outcomes, including MTTR, incident reduction, and operational efficiency

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in SRE, production support, or software/infrastructure engineering, with a hands-on track record of building production automation and monitoring
• Strong programming and scripting skills in Python and Bash/shell, with working knowledge of Java, Node.js, JavaScript, and TypeScript sufficient to read application code, diagnose defects, and contribute fixes
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines to automate deployment, configuration, and operational tasks
• Strong expertise in observability (logs, metrics, traces), distributed systems, and SLO/SLI design, including implementing monitoring and alerting as code
• Ability to work independently, drive cross-team initiatives, and influence engineering and operations practices
• Experience mentoring or technically guiding other engineers
• Strong problem-solving and incident leadership skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading SRE or reliability teams in complex, enterprise environments
• Experience automating ITSM workflows (e.g., ServiceNow), including event-to-incident integration and auto-remediation
• Experience driving enterprise SRE or monitoring transformations
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and containers
• Experience with open-source observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• Exposure to AI SRE / AIOps platforms
• Strong focus on measurable outcomes and operational improvement

#LI-WRAPJOB

Location Expectation: This is a hybrid role requiring a minimum of 3 days per week in office.

The expected salary range for this position is $140,000 - $180,000. This role may also be eligible for annual short-term incentive compensation. All incentives and benefits are subject to the applicable plan terms.

Benefits We Offer

Our U.S. benefits address holistic well-being with programs for physical and mental health, financial wellness, and support for families. We offer a comprehensive health plan that includes medical/prescription drug and vision, dental insurance, and no-cost short- and long-term disability. We also provide company-paid life insurance and legal services, a retirement pension funded entirely by MetLife and 401(k) with employer matching, group discounts on voluntary insurance products including auto and home, pet, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and accident insurance, as well as Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and digital mental health programs, parental leave, paid time off, paid holidays, volunteer time off, tuition assistance and much more! For more information regarding MetLife's U.S. benefits, please click here.

About MetLife

Recognized on Fortune magazine\''s list of the "World\''s Most Admired Companies", Fortune World's 25 Best Workplaces, as well as the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, MetLife, through its subsidiaries and affiliates, is one of the world's leading financial services companies; providing insurance, annuities, employee benefits and asset management to individual and institutional customers. With operations in more than 40 markets, we hold leading positions in the United States, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

As part of our New Frontier strategy, MetLife is building an AI-enabled, people-centered future. We're looking for people who bring curiosity, adaptability, and a growth mindset as we use AI to enhance how we serve customers, support communities, and evolve the way work gets done. At MetLife, AI is a responsible partner that supports human judgment, creativity, and continuous improvement while helping us build trust, inclusion, and long-term value.

Our purpose is simple - to help our colleagues, customers, communities, and the world at large create a more confident future. United by purpose and guided by our core values - Win Together, Do the Right Thing, Deliver Impact Over Activity, and Think Ahead - we're inspired to transform the next century in financial services. At MetLife, it's #AllTogetherPossible. Join us!

MetLife is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employment decisions are made without regards to race, color, national origin, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, marital or domestic/civil partnership status, genetic information, citizenship status (although applicants and employees must be legally authorized to work in the United States), uniformed service member or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law ("protected characteristics").

If you need an accommodation due to a disability, please email us at accommodations@metlife.com. This information will be held in confidence and used only to determine an appropriate accommodation for the application process.

MetLife maintains a drug-free workplace.

This posting is for a current vacancy and is anticipated to remain open for at least 90 days from the listed posting date.

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