Manager, Systems Reliability Engineering

Job Requirements

Department Description

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world - a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences - and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

Team Description

The Manager, Systems Reliability Engineering (SRE) will be responsible for the SRE Observability team designs, implements, and continuously improves enterprise observability capabilities that enable proactive detection, faster incident resolution, and improved system reliability.

The Team integrates metrics, events, logs, and traces across applications, infrastructure, and networks, applying AIOps, anomaly detection, event correlation, dashboards, SLOs, and automation to provide a unified view of service health. Working across Operations, SRE, infrastructure, network, and application teams, the team identifies observability gaps and blind spots, improves telemetry and alert quality, and drives measurable reductions in MTTD, MTTR, and reactive outages

What You Will Do

Key Responsibilities:

Build and Lead the Observability Center of Excellence

• Establish and operationalize an Observability Center of Excellence (COE), including governance, standards, and adoption models
• Define the enterprise observability vision, roadmap, and maturity model aligned to business outcomes
• Develop and enforce standards for telemetry (logs, metrics, traces, events), tool usage, and instrumentation
• Drive cross-functional alignment across engineering, operations, SRE, and platform teams

Drive Observability Maturity and Transformation

• Lead the transition from reactive monitoring to proactive, predictive observability
• Perform current-state assessments to identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement
• Build and execute a multi-phase roadmap toward AI-driven, full-stack observability
• Establish and track KPIs such as MTTD, MTTR, alert quality, and system coverage

Improve Monitoring, Alerting, and Signal Quality

• Reduce noise and alert fatigue through event correlation, anomaly detection, and tuning
• Standardize alerting frameworks and ensure alignment with business priorities
• Drive consolidation of observability tooling and improve ROI on monitoring investments
• Ensure monitoring coverage across all Tier 0/1 systems and critical services

Develop Unified Observability Platforms & Insights

• Deliver centralized dashboards and insights that enable data-driven operational decisions
• Create a unified view of system health, customer impact, and service dependencies
• Integrate observability into incident response, automation, and AIOps workflows
• Ensure observability data enables rapid root cause analysis and continuous improvement

Technical Leadership

• Act as a player-coach, directly contributing to architecture, implementation, and troubleshooting
• Design and implement observability solutions across cloud, infrastructure, and application layers
• Guide instrumentation strategies using modern frameworks (e.g., OpenTelemetry)
• Partner with engineering teams to embed observability into the development lifecycle

Governance, Standards, and Continuous Improvement

• Establish governance frameworks for observability data, tools, and practices
• Define onboarding standards for new systems into the observability platform
• Lead continuous service improvement (CSI) initiatives to enhance visibility and reliability
• Promote knowledge sharing, documentation, and runbook standardization

Required Qualifications & Skills:

• Minimum of 8+ years of experience in observability, monitoring, SRE, or production engineering
• Minimum of 3+ years in management roles
• Proven experience building or scaling observability platforms or CoE functions
• Strong hands-on expertise with observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, BigPanda, Grafana)
• Experience with logs, metrics, traces, and distributed systems observability
• Demonstrated success reducing MTTR, MTTD, and improving system reliability
• Experience integrating observability into incident management and service operations
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and modern architectures

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with AIOps, automation, and predictive analytics
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and observability standards
• Background in large-scale enterprise environments with tool consolidation initiatives
• Experience leading cross-functional transformation programs

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

Disclaimer

PAY TRANSPARENCY

The hiring range for this position in Orlando, FL is $165,900 - $222,400 and in Burbank, CA is $174,100 - 233,500. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.

This position is with Disney Worldwide Services, Inc., which is part of a business we call The Walt Disney Company (Corporate). To learn more about Disney's guidelines on the use of AI for candidates, click here. Disney Worldwide Services, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

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