Tech Lead, Site Reliability

At Podium, we bring AI Employees to local businesses that turn every conversation into revenue. Trusted by 60,000+ businesses across Auto, Home Services, and Aesthetics, Podium captures and converts leads 24/7, driving both new business and repeat customers.

In 2.5 years, we crossed $150M in AI Agent ARR. During this time, we’ve deployed 10,000 AI employees to empower real business outcomes for our customers. Podium is building what we believe will be the most impactful AI employee ecosystem for local business.

Podium has been recognized as the Best AI Implementation by Inc. Magazine, highlighted by OpenAI for building revenue-driving AI Agents, and awarded the #1 AI Agent for Business Operations by G2.

Our growth is fueled by hiring exceptional people, holding them to high standards, and creating opportunities for them to grow and make an impact. Our operating principles guide daily behavior and ensure we hire people who will thrive at Podium. If you're hungry for growth, aligned to our operating principles, and ready to get to work, you won't find a better place to learn and 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.