Director, Quality & Reliability Engineering

Company Alaska Airlines The Team

Guided by our purpose, core values, and leadership principles, we are creating an airline people love. Our corporate teams set the strategies and operational plans to ensure the success of our company. Whether we use our expertise in accounting, human resources, finance, planning, legal, marketing, or any of our operational divisions, our shared passion for travel and our guests is what motivates us to achieve excellence each day. If you share our passion for creating an airline people love, we want to hear from you.

Role Summary

The Director, Quality & Reliability Engineering sets the long-term strategy and oversees the financial performance of Quality & Reliability Engineering for eCommerce and Digital Experience at Alaska Airlines (AS) and Hawaiian Airlines (HA). As a people leader, this role establishes strategic goals and direction for a team of leaders to deliver reliable, performant, scalable, and resilient digital products and platforms through Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), safe release delivery, incident management, and observability. This role partners across Product, Engineering, Architecture, Design, Platform, and Digital Operations to ensure safe releases, production-ready launches, and rapid incident resolution while balancing speed, cost, and reliability.

Key Duties

• Set and govern automated, risk-based release and deployment standards that move changes to production safely and predictably. Oversee change governance, release risk, progressive delivery, and go/no-go decisions for high-risk changes.
• Lead rapid detection, triage, escalation, resolution, and communication for production incidents. Own major-incident command, blameless reviews, corrective actions, and prevention of recurring failures. Shape the culture of the team through action, presence, and reinforcement of behaviors that support ownership and accountability.
• Define production-readiness standards to ensure new services, features, and platforms are reliable, observable, scalable, and supportable at launch. Partner with Product and Engineering to embed Service Level Objectives (SLOs), capacity, recovery, and resilience requirements before launch.
• Set the monitoring, observability, and alerting strategy across digital services. Ensure actionable signals, dashboards, and thresholds are in place, and provide clear reporting to executives and stakeholders on service health, availability, incident trends, SLO and Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance, reliability key performance indicators (KPIs), and operational risk.
• Establish strategic goals and direction for a team of people leaders across multiple disciplines to drive automation, resilience engineering, and toil reduction across production operations. Advance automated recovery, capacity planning, resilience testing, and reusable reliability capabilities.
• Build and develop a high-performing organization with accountability to performance and guest experience. Set goals, manage performance, and grow capability across reliability, release, incident, quality, and operational disciplines. Develop people through effective performance management and ongoing feedback, focusing on fostering strategic and systems thinking, development of talent, and succession planning across teams and disciplines.
• Set long-term strategy, with a 12+ month horizon, for the SRE function. Define the SRE roadmap, standards, and reliability KPIs, and drive continuous improvement across people, process, architecture, and tooling.
• Partner across Product, Engineering, Architecture, Platform, and Digital Operations to establish shared accountability for service reliability, and enable teams to own and operate their services while SRE provides standards, automation, tooling, and expertise. Manage relevant budgets and vendors, and represent operational health and risk to senior leadership.

Job-Specific Experience, Education & Skills

Required

• 8 years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, or production engineering supporting large-scale, customer-facing services.
• 5 years of leadership experience, with either: 2 of those years directly leading people, or 3 years of advanced functional subject matter expertise in site reliability engineering.
• Demonstrated experience leading an SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering organization.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, cloud architecture, scalability, fault tolerance, production operations, SLOs and SLAs, observability, and monitoring.
• Bachelor’s degree, or an additional two years of relevant training/experience in lieu of this degree.
• Experience applying software engineering and automation to improve reliability and reduce operational toil, including progressive delivery, automated rollback, resilience testing, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.
• Excellent project and program management and organizational skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities under pressure.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to influence and communicate operational risk and performance to executive leadership.
• Data-driven problem solver with a proven history of continuous improvement and self-development.
• High school diploma or equivalent.
• Minimum age of 18.
• Must be authorized to work in the U.S.

Preferred

• Experience in eCommerce, airline, or other high-availability consumer digital environments.
• Familiarity with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) incident and problem-management practices.
• Experience with modern monitoring/observability and incident tooling (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, PagerDuty).
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms and modern continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

Job-Specific Leadership Expectations

• Embody our values to own safety, do the right thing, be caring and kind, and deliver performance.
• Lead and develop high-performing teams, set the vision and standards for operational excellence, and drive a culture of reliability, ownership, and accountability across the organization.

Starting Rate

Salary Range $198,450-$307,600 / year Total Target Compensation Range (incl. bonus & equity) $257,986-$399,880 Salary Details

The pay range and total target compensation package listed above is the expected pay offered for this position at the start of employment. Your pay will be based on multiple factors, including and not limited to location, your relevant experience/level, experience level, and skillset while balancing internal equity relative to other Alaska/Hawaiian/Horizon employees. Alaska/Hawaiian/Horizon is committed to fair, unbiased compensation along with competitive benefits in all locations in which we operate.

Note: We don't typically hire at the top of the range.

Total Rewards

Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Horizon Air pay and benefits can vary by company, location, number of regularly scheduled hours worked, length of employment, and employment status.

• Free stand-by travel privileges on Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines & Horizon Air with high priority status
• Select number of confirmed travel credits provided annually
• Comprehensive well-being programs including medical, dental and vision benefits
• Generous 401k match program
• Annual bonus plans
• Generous holiday and paid time off

For more information about Alaska/Hawaiian/Horizon Total Rewards please visit our career site and view benefits.

Regulatory Information

Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement

It is the policy of Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Horizon Air to comply with all applicable federal, state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment and to ensure equal opportunity in all terms, conditions, and benefits of employment or potential employment.

We also prohibit discrimination and harassment against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information and other legally protected categories.

We have established an EEO Compliance Program under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (“Section 503”) and the Vietnam Era Veteran’s Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 (“VEVRAA”). All applicants and employees are treated without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. In addition, we have established an audit and reporting system to allow for effective measurement of its equal employment opportunity activities.

To implement this policy, we will:

(1) Recruit, hire, train and promote qualified persons in all job titles, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information and any other legally protected categories; (2) Ensure that employment decisions are based only on valid job requirements; and (3) Ensure that all personnel actions and employment activities such as compensation, benefits, promotions, layoffs, return from layoff, Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Horizon Air sponsored programs, and tuition assistance will be administered without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information and other legally protected categories.

Employees and applicants for employment will not be subjected to harassment, intimidation, threats, coercion or discrimination because they have engaged or may engage in (1) filing a complaint, (2) opposing any act or practice made unlawful by, or exercising any other right protected by, any Federal, State or local law requiring equal opportunity, including Section 503 and the equal opportunity provisions of VEVRAA, or (3) assisting or participating in any investigation, compliance evaluation, hearing, or any other activity related to the administration of any Federal, State or local law requiring equal opportunity, including Section 503 and the equal opportunity provisions of VEVRAA.

Government Contractor & Department of Transportation (DOT) Regulations Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines & Horizon Air are regulated by the Department of Transportation (DOT – regulations, 49 CFR part 40) and all applicants are advised that post-offer and/or pre-employment drug testing will be conducted to determine the presence of marijuana, cocaine, opioids, phencyclidine (PCP) and amphetamines or a metabolite of these drugs prior to any offer or employment or transfer into a safety-sensitive position. Failure to submit to testing or positive indications of drug use will render the applicant ineligible for employment with Alaska Airlines/Hawaiian Airlines/Horizon Air and any employment offer will be withdrawn.

Apply by 7:00 PM Pacific Time on 11/19/2026 FLSA Status Exempt Employment Type Full-Time Regular/Temporary Regular Requisition Type Management Location Seattle - Hub

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