SVP of Production Engineering & Autonomous Operations
Your production environment already has a first responder — and it isn't human. AI agents are correlating alerts, tracing code paths, cross-referencing historical RCAs, and executing remediations within policy before an engineer even picks up the page. Your job is to make that system smarter, safer, and more autonomous every single week.
We're looking for a battle-tested production engineering leader to take full ownership of reliability and autonomous operations for an enterprise SaaS platform that serves the world's biggest brands. You won't grow a large team to absorb operational load — you'll build the intelligent agent layer that replaces that need entirely.
Your Mission
You are the single accountable executive for production health, customer-facing reliability, and the AI-driven operating surface that keeps it all running. You report directly to the CEO, represent operations to enterprise customers during critical moments, and spend a meaningful share of your week writing and shipping agent code yourself.
The team beneath you is deliberately small, globally distributed, and composed entirely of senior engineers. There is no tiered support model. Every person — including you — builds agents, authors runbooks, owns incidents end-to-end, and pushes the autonomous surface forward.
What the Week Looks Like
- Reliability as a weekly scoreboard. You track availability, MTTR, and customer satisfaction on a week-over-week cadence. Trends matter more than snapshots — you course-correct in days, not quarters.
- Agent engineering is the core product. You design, extend, and govern autonomous agents that handle pre-triage, alarm creation, change-gate enforcement, auto-healing, and customer-facing RCA generation. Every agent has defined scope, measured acceptance rates, documented failure modes, and a human escape hatch.
- Hands on the keyboard. You personally drive high-severity bridges when top-tier customers are impacted. You write root-cause analyses. You ship agent code. If you haven't touched production systems in the last year, this seat won't fit.
- Enterprise-facing executive presence. When a major account needs an operations leader in the room, that's you. Your goal is to engineer the systems that make those moments increasingly rare — and to earn trust when they aren't.
- Talent as a craft. You recruit and retain engineers who belong in the top 1% of the field. No volume hiring, no backfill treadmill — every addition to the team raises the ceiling.
What We Require
- Ownership without limits. You operate as though platform reliability is your personal P&L — your money, your customers, your reputation on the line.
- 10+ years in production engineering, SRE, or SaaS operations at serious scale, with 3+ years at the SVP, VP, or Head-of level running a senior-only engineering organization.
- Already living the AI-first operating model. You have built, deployed, or led agent-driven incident response and auto-remediation systems in real production environments. You use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent agentic development environments daily — not experimentally.
- Deep AWS operational expertise. Multi-AZ, multi-account, production-hardened. Real outage scars, not just certifications.
- Executive-caliber communication. You interface with the CEO and enterprise customer leadership with clarity and confidence. Fluent or advanced English is non-negotiable.
- US-morning time-zone overlap (~13:00–17:00 UTC). OFAC-clear country of residence.
Bonus Points
- Recognized voice in autonomous operations — original writing, conference talks, or open-source contributions on agentic SRE, AIOps, or harness-over-headcount philosophy.
- Multi-tenant B2B SaaS background — community platforms, social engagement, observability, or customer-experience tooling.
- Working fluency with modern observability stacks: Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Datadog, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or similar.
- A documented obsession outside of work — a side project, deep hobby, or open-source effort that reveals how you think when no one is assigning the problem.
Why This Role Exists Now
The playbook for AI-native production operations at enterprise scale is being written in real time. The leader who gets it right in the next 12 months sets the standard everyone else follows. You'll have uncapped AI tooling, no bureaucratic gates, a senior-only team, and the freedom to define what autonomous production engineering actually looks like when the stakes are real. Fully remote, async-first, outcome-obsessed — enterprise gravity with startup velocity.