Tech Lead, Site Reliability

At Podium, we build an AI Workforce that helps local businesses turn every conversation into revenue. More than 60,000 businesses across Auto, Home Services, and Aesthetics trust Podium to drive growth 24/7, from capturing new leads to re-engaging past customers.

Two and a half years ago, we made a deliberate shift from building software for local businesses to building AI Employees that work for them. Every local business struggles to answer every call, lead, and follow-up. Our AI Operating System and AI Workforce fill that gap. We’ve crossed $150M in AI ARR, deployed more than 20,000 AI Employees, and helped customers generate over $13B in revenue.

Inc. Magazine named Podium the Best AI Implementation, OpenAI highlighted us for building AI Agents that drive revenue, and G2 ranked us the #1 AI Agent for Business Operations.

Podium is AI-native in every sense. We build AI for our customers, we build AI tools for ourselves, and we use AI in every role across the company.

We hire exceptional people, hold them to high standards, and give them room to make an impact. We look for people who are all-in on AI and eager to stay on the cutting edge, both in what we build for customers and in how they operate day to day. If you’re hungry for growth, aligned with our operating principles, and ready to get to work, you won’t find a better place to accelerate your career.

About the Role

We're looking for a SRE Manager to help us build and run infrastructure that just works - even at 3am. You'll lead a team of engineers who care as much about preventing incidents as they do about resolving them, and you'll bring a builder's mindset to reliability: automating toil, sharpening our observability, and increasingly, putting AI to work so humans can focus on the problems that actually need them.

This is a role for someone who's equally comfortable in a 1:1 coaching a direct report and in the middle of a SEV-1 driving toward resolution.

What you will be doing: 

Your Team

• Coach, mentor, and grow a team of SREs — real career development, not just performance reviews on a calendar
• Hire and retain strong engineers; build a team people want to stay on
• Create a culture where blameless postmortems are the norm and people feel safe raising issues early
• Drive day-to-day project management for the team - running standups, grooming and tracking tickets, and keeping work visible to stakeholders

Reliability & Systems

• Own the availability and performance of production systems end-to-end
• Set the bar on SLIs/SLOs/SLAs and error budgets - and hold the team (and yourself) to them
• Run incident management: on-call, escalation, and the postmortems that actually change something afterward
• Push automation hard so the team spends less time on repetitive firefighting and more on durable fixes
• Own capacity planning, scaling, and disaster recovery strategy

AI-Augmented Operations

• Put AI investigation/incident agents to work proactively surfacing issues - degraded services, slow endpoints, anomalous error rates - before they page anyone
• Evaluate and tune AI/LLM-based tooling to cut down false positives and sharpen alerting
• Bring AI into the incident workflow itself: auto-summarizing incidents, suggesting root cause, drafting the first pass of a postmortem
• Know where automation should stop and human judgment should take over - and make that call
• Keep scouting for the next place AI can shave time off MTTR or catch something before a customer does

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Security to bake reliability into the SDLC from the start, not bolt it on after
• Be the calm, clear voice coordinating stakeholders during major incidents
• Represent SRE in architecture reviews and roadmap conversations - and push back when reliability is an afterthought
• Translate reliability metrics and risk into language leadership can act on

Process & Strategy

• Keep runbooks and playbooks current - not aspirational documents nobody opens during an incident
• Track the metrics that matter: uptime, MTTR, MTTD, error budgets
• Drive continuous improvement in monitoring, alerting, and incident tooling
• Weigh in on budget and vendor decisions for observability and infrastructure

What you should have:

• 8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering
• 2+ years leading or managing a team
• Deep familiarity with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), plus Kubernetes/Docker
• Real experience with observability tooling - Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb, ClickHouse
• Comfort with CI/CD and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar)
• A track record of owning incident management and building a genuine postmortem culture
• Strong scripting/programming chops (Python, Go, or similar)
• The ability to explain a gnarly technical problem to someone who doesn't want the gnarly details

What we hope you have:

• Experience implementing telephony solutions in-house.
• Chaos engineering experience
• Managing on-call across distributed or global teams
• Exposure to security/compliance-adjacent reliability work (SOC2, ISO 27001)
• A history of scaling an SRE function as a company grows

How You Think:

• Strategic enough to see around corners, hands-on enough to jump in when it matters
• You own outcomes, especially the messy ones, during an incident
• You can triage ruthlessly when everything feels urgent
• You trust data over gut feel, but you know when to override both
• You lead like you're on the team, not above it

Why you'll love working here:

Podium is the best place to work to

• Join the leaders in AI agents — you'll be building on top of a product already trusted by 60,000+ businesses to run their AI Employee, with a real mandate and real usage to learn from
• Unlock career-defining growth — this role owns a product area at the center of Podium's future, with the scope and visibility that comes with it
• Build with world-class talent — join a team of engineers who ship fast, use AI tooling seriously, and care as much about outcomes as elegance
• Make a real impact on local business — the agents you build directly help local businesses respond faster, convert more leads, and grow revenue without adding headcount

Benefits:

• Open and transparent culture 
• Life insurance, long and short-term disability coverage
• Paid maternity and paternity leave
• Fertility Benefits
• Generous vacation time, plus three 4-day summer holiday weekends
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision benefits
• 401k Plan with company matching
• Bi-annual swag drops with cool Podium gear and apparel 
• A stellar HQ (Utah) gym with local professional coaches and classes offered
• Onsite HQ (Utah) child care center, subsidized for employees

Podium is an equal opportunity employer. Podium provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, genetic information, marital status or veteran status.