Manager of Reliability Operations

About Nexcess Nexcess brings together a portfolio of hosting, cloud, and digital experience brands to deliver high-performance infrastructure and services to businesses worldwide. Our platforms power mission-critical applications for thousands of customers. Reliability is foundational to everything we do. We operate complex environments spanning virtualization, storage, networking, and application hosting; where performance, availability, and consistency matter at scale. This is a permanent, full-time, remote position. US Pay Band - $110K - $150K Actual compensation will vary based on experience, skills, and location. About the Role We’re looking for a Manager of Reliability Operations to lead how we detect, respond to, and learn from failures across our platform ecosystem. This role sits at the intersection of Operations and Engineering, bringing structure to incident response, accountability to follow-through, and clarity to reliability insights. You’ll ensure that what we learn from production directly improves how our platforms are built, operated, and scaled. What You’ll Do Own Reliability Operations & Incident Command Continuously evolve and improve incident management, change management, and post-incident practices Establish clear standards for incident declaration, severity, escalation, and communication Ensure consistent execution across teams and continuous process improvement Own the incident command function, including roles, structure, and operating procedures Lead or oversee major incident response in a 24/7 production environment Build and manage on-call incident commander rotations with global coverage Drive Learning, Accountability & Reliability Strategy Own post-incident reviews, ensuring strong root cause analysis and clear documentation Translate incident trends into actionable reliability improvements Drive completion of corrective actions across teams; escalate when needed Define and maintain service performance and reliability targets (availability, latency, error rates) Own observability strategy, including monitoring, alerting, and signal quality Improve detection, reduce time to resolution, and increase platform resilience Partner with Engineering and Operations on capacity planning, patching, and lifecycle decisions Ensure reliability insights directly inform platform and infrastructure roadmaps Collaborate with Security on vulnerability response, patch prioritization, and compliance alignment Operate Across a Complex Platform Environment Work across environments including virtualization platforms (VMware), distributed storage (Ceph), Linux-based systems, and hybrid cloud infrastructure Support platforms that span dedicated hosting, managed applications, and high-availability cloud services Ensure reliability practices scale across multiple products, brands, and customer environments Provide regular, data-driven reporting to leadership on availability, incident trends, and operational performance Act as the central authority on reliability insights across teams What You Bring Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience) 7+ experience in systems operations, site reliability, or platform engineering 2+ years experience leading teams or major operational functions Proven experience managing incidents in a 24/7 production environment Strong background in troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and operational improvement Experience with change management practices Platform & Tooling Experience Monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic) Incident management and alerting tools (e.g., PagerDuty, Opsgenie) Infrastructure and platform technologies (Linux systems, VMware, Ceph, cloud platforms) Logging and telemetry systems (centralized logging, metrics, tracing) Ability to translate complex technical data into clear insights Strong communication skills, especially in high-pressure situations Nice to Have Background in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field Experience in managed hosting, cloud infrastructure, or SaaS environments Experience defining and tracking system reliability and performance targets Familiarity with ITIL or similar operational frameworks Exposure to VMware, Ceph, Linux, and Windows platforms Relevant certifications (AWS, RHCE, etc.) We Offer: Traditional and Roth 401k with company matching A collaborative team culture Consistent/set work hours Challenging non-redundant daily duties A voice in how things get done Disclaimer: This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all job responsibilities, tasks, or duties. Additional duties and tasks may be assigned as part of the job function. Liquid Web Inc. reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description in a way that best supports the organizational needs. The job description in no way creates or implies an employment contract. The employment contract remains “at will”. Equal Employment Opportunity Policy: Liquid Web is committed to offering equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. #LI-Remote Manual Data for Pay Scale - Suggested Range for Manager of Process Operations - $110 - $150 PayFactors - Reliability Engineer $140K Process Analyst $85K Median Manager of Process Operations - $112K Higher-Scope Variant: SRE Manager This is an SRE but includes some leadership and strategy in scope Average: $132,583 Typical range: $114K – $151K Top end: $175K Salary.com - SRE Leadership Average: $165K Range $150K - $185K Market data shows baseline Reliability Manager roles averaging around $100K, but those positions are typically scoped to team-level responsibilities or localized operational support. Roles with broader operational ownership, particularly those responsible for defining and enforcing incident management, change management, and post-incident processes across an organization,trend higher, with comparable operations and SRE leadership roles averaging $115K – $130K and extending into the $150K+ range at senior levels. This position is not simply managing reliability within a team; it owns how the organization operates during incidents, how work is prioritized and escalated, and how accountability is enforced across functions. Because the role is responsible for driving consistency, governance, and follow-through across Operations, Engineering, and Security, it aligns more closely with senior operational leadership than traditional reliability management. Positioning the role in the $110K – $150K range ensures we can attract candidates with the experience to build, standardize, and scale these processes effectively.