Site Reliability Engineer Manager Jobs in Illinois

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) - Release & Operations is a hybrid technical and operational role responsible for bridging software development and technology operations. This position focuses on managing and optimizing the software release lifecycle, driving change management governance, and facilitating communication across technical and business teams.

In addition to release engineering responsibilities, this role requires a hands-on technical professional who can develop automation solutions to reduce operational overhead, actively support production environments, and help ensure the availability, security, scalability, and reliability of cloud-based infrastructure and applications.

• Lead and coordinate the end-to-end software release lifecycle, including planning, scheduling, staging, deployment, validation, and post-release activities.
• Participate in and facilitate change management processes, evaluating release readiness, assessing risks, and ensuring governance and compliance requirements are met prior to production deployment.
• Serve as a primary point of contact for engineering, quality assurance, product, operations, and business stakeholders regarding deployment schedules, release status, risk assessments, and rollback strategies.
• Continuously improve release management processes by transitioning manual activities into automated, repeatable workflows and CI/CD controls.
• Drive release standardization and promote best practices across development and operations teams.

• Provide hands-on production support, ensuring operational stability and participating in incident response and on-call support activities.
• Design, develop, and maintain automation tools, scripts, and workflows to reduce operational effort and improve system reliability.
• Respond to service interruptions, outages, and operational incidents, performing root cause analysis and implementing long-term corrective actions.
• Implement and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solutions to ensure consistent, scalable, and repeatable infrastructure deployments.
• Configure, manage, and optimize monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to provide visibility into application and infrastructure health.
• Identify opportunities to improve system reliability, scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.

• Ensure deployment and operational processes adhere to applicable security, governance, compliance, and risk management requirements.
• Collaborate closely with software engineering, quality assurance, platform, infrastructure, and security teams to establish reliable deployment and operational practices.
• Maintain accurate and audit-ready documentation, including operational procedures, deployment records, runbooks, incident reports, and change logs.
• Support continuous improvement initiatives related to operational excellence, reliability engineering, and service delivery.

• Experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, system administration, cloud operations, release engineering, or related technical roles.
• Demonstrated experience managing software releases and coordinating deployments within structured change management processes.
• Knowledge of cloud infrastructure platforms and services.
• Experience building, deploying, and maintaining scalable cloud-based systems and applications.
• Solid understanding of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) principles and tools.
• Strong scripting and automation skills using languages such as Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar technologies.
• Experience supporting production systems and participating in incident management and root cause analysis activities.
• Understanding of monitoring, observability, alerting, and operational support practices.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to collaborate across technical and non-technical teams.
• Ability to balance operational stability with delivery speed and business objectives.

• Experience with change management, IT service management, or governance frameworks.
• Professional certifications related to cloud platforms, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, infrastructure, or IT service management.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation frameworks.
• Familiarity with modern monitoring, observability, and application performance management solutions.
• Experience with containerization and container orchestration technologies.
• Exposure to highly regulated or compliance-driven environments.
• Experience supporting audit activities, change controls, and operational governance processes.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and distributed systems.

Experience with technologies similar to the following is beneficial:

• AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform), or comparable cloud providers

• Python
• Bash
• PowerShell
• Shell scripting and automation frameworks

• Terraform
• CloudFormation
• Ansible
• Similar infrastructure automation tools

• GitHub Actions
• GitLab CI/CD
• Jenkins
• Azure DevOps
• Other modern deployment automation platforms

• Prometheus
• Grafana
• Datadog
• Cloud-native monitoring solutions
• Log aggregation and alerting platforms

• Docker
• Kubernetes
• ECS
• EKS
• Other container orchestration platforms

• Strong collaboration and communication skills with the ability to align technical and business stakeholders.
• Systems-thinking mindset with a focus on solving root causes through automation and process improvement.
• Detail-oriented approach to change management, risk mitigation, and operational excellence.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills in complex production environments.
• Ability to identify opportunities to improve reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency.
• Commitment to continuous learning and adoption of modern cloud, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering practices.
• Proactive ownership mentality with the ability to operate effectively in fast-paced and evolving environments.