Director, Reliability Engineering

POS-31619

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Director, Reliability Engineering

Role Summary

Our mission at HubSpot is to help millions of organizations grow better. HubSpot’s engineering organization has grown to more than 2,000 engineers shipping across thousands of services and deploying thousands of times per day. As HubSpot has become core infrastructure for over 200,000 customers worldwide, reliability isn’t just a priority — it’s foundational to customer trust and business growth.

Our Reliability Engineering team has matured from an early SRE function into a strategic pillar within Platform Infrastructure. The team has driven a 76% reduction in critical incidents while the platform scaled 19x in deployables, established company-wide SLO frameworks, and built the incident management practices that keep HubSpot running.

Now we’re entering the next phase: leveraging AI and agentic approaches to fundamentally transform how we detect, respond to, and prevent outages. As Director of Reliability Engineering, you’ll lead this evolution — deepening our reliability capabilities, pioneering AI-assisted operations, and ensuring HubSpot remains a platform customers can confidently bet their business on.

What You’ll Do

Lead and Develop the Team

• Lead a team of ~20 reliability engineers, fostering a culture of operational excellence, continuous learning, and customer obsession
• Attract, develop, and retain top talent; build career paths that keep engineers engaged and growing

Own Reliability Strategy

• Define and drive HubSpot's reliability roadmap, balancing proactive resilience investments with reactive incident reduction
• Partner with Infrastructure leadership to prioritize reliability initiatives alongside cost, performance, and platform evolution
• Set and evolve SLO standards that align engineering effort with customer experience

Pioneer AI-Driven Operations

• Lead the strategy for integrating AI and agentic approaches into incident detection, diagnosis, and mitigation-reducing time-to-resolution and human toil
• Explore and implement AI-assisted tooling for pattern recognition across incidents, automated runbook execution, and predictive reliability insights
• Build intelligent systems that learn from our operational history, proactively surface risks, and recommend-or execute-mitigation actions
• Balance automation with human judgment-designing systems where AI augments engineers rather than creating blind spots

Drive Company-Wide Impact

• Own incident management end-to-end: response coordination, executive communication during major incidents, and blameless post-incident reviews that drive systemic improvement
• Influence engineering culture across 100+ product teams-evangelizing reliability practices without compromising team autonomy
• Identify systemic risks across the platform and drive cross-functional mitigation efforts

Represent Reliability at the Executive Level

• Serve as the voice of reliability in leadership forums, translating technical risk into business terms
• Communicate transparently with customers and stakeholders during and after operational incidents
• Partner with peer directors across Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and Security to align on shared priorities

What You’ll Bring

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, SRE, or infrastructure, with 5+ years leading teams
• Track record of building and scaling reliability functions at companies with significant operational complexity
• Deep technical fluency-you can dive into architecture discussions, incident analysis, and system design with credibility
• Curiosity and vision for how AI/ML can transform operations; experience with or strong interest in AIOps, agentic automation, or ML-driven observability is a plus
• Proven ability to drive cultural and process change across a large engineering organization without top-down mandates
• Strong executive communication skills; comfortable leading incident bridges, presenting to leadership, and representing reliability externally
• Experience with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), observability tooling, and incident management practices
• A philosophy that balances reliability with velocity-you understand that the goal is sustainable speed, not gates
  
  

Why This Role

This is a high-visibility, high-impact leadership role at an inflection point. You'll own one of Infrastructure's four core pillars at a company where platform stability directly enables customer growth. You'll have the mandate to shape how AI transforms operational practices-not just at