About this role
Your success is a train ride away!
As we move America’s workforce toward the future, Amtrak connects businesses and communities across the country. We employ more than 20,000 diverse, energetic professionals in a variety of career fields throughout the United States. The safety of our passengers, our employees, the public and our operating environment is our priority, and the success of our railroad is due to our employees.
Are you ready to join our team?
Our values of ‘Do the Right Thing, Excel Together and Put Customers First’ are at the heart of what matters most to us, and our Core Capabilities, ‘Building Trust, Accountability, Effective Communication, Customer Focus, and Proactive Safety & Security’ are what every employee needs to know and do to be most impactful at Amtrak. By living the Amtrak values, focusing on our capabilities, and actively embracing and fostering diverse ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives, together we will honor our past and make Amtrak a company of the future.
JOB SUMMARY:
The SRE/Observability Sr Manager is a people-focused technical leader responsible for building, developing, and leading a high-performing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Observability team. This role ensures the reliability, scalability, security, performance, and cost efficiency of critical platforms and services by embedding SRE best practices across the organization.
The Sr Manager drives the adoption and execution of key reliability disciplines, including service level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, incident management, observability, capacity planning, resilience engineering, and chaos testing. Partnering closely with engineering, product, architecture, and operations teams, this role transforms reliability from a technical metric into a measurable business outcome that enhances customer experience and operational excellence.
This leader champions automation and toil reduction, strengthens operational readiness, and establishes data-driven insights through modern observability practices. The role also ensures compliance, governance, and audit-ready operations while fostering a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:
- Team Leadership & Talent Development Build and lead a diverse team of SREs; set goals, run performance cycles, succession planning, hiring, onboarding, and skills matrices; foster a blameless, data-driven, learning culture.
- Observability & Operational Intelligence Drive coverage and quality for logs, metrics, traces, synthetics, and RUM; standardize dashboards/alerts; measure alert fatigue and precision; guide AIOps/ML-assisted detection adoption. Experience in Dynatrace Observability Platform is preferred.
- Automation & Toil Reduction Measure toil, prioritize automation backlogs, and scale self-service and platform capabilities (golden runbooks, reusable modules); ensure high-quality IaC and policy-as-code patterns.
- SLO & Error-Budget Governance Institutionalize SLIs/SLOs and error budgets across services; review burn rates, partner with product owners on release gating and reliability trade-offs; maintain reliability scorecards.
- Incident Readiness & Response Own incident management runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call health; staff and train incident commanders; lead post-incident reviews focused on systemic, automatable fixes and MTTR reduction.
- Security, Risk & Compliance Embed security-by-design (zero-trust patterns, scanning, attestations), enforce least-privilege and key rotation, ensure audit evidence for change/incident/compliance workflows.
- Stakeholder & Portfolio Management Publish reliability KPIs; align reliability roadmaps with product priorities; coordinate cross-team initiatives and vendor/tooling relationships; manage team budget.
- Capacity, Performance & Cost Run capacity forecasting, performance testing, resilience/chaos game days; track unit economics (cost per request/service) and partner with FinOps for continuous optimization.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent combination of education, training and/or relevant experience. Plus 9 years of relevant work experience.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or equivalent combination of education, training and/or relevant experience. Plus 11 years of relevant work experience.
- 10+ years of progressive experience in Enterprise Observability, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, and Infrastructure Engineering, including a minimum of 4 years in a people leadership and organizational management role.
KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS and ABILITIES:
- Demonstrated success in building, mentoring, and leading high-performing Observability and SRE teams, with direct management responsibility for teams of 5 or more engineers.
- Proven track record of establishing and operating enterprise-scale on-call programs, incident management processes, and service reliability practices, driving measurable improvements in system availability, operational efficiency, and customer experience.
- Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical and business leaders across the organization.
- Deep technical expertise in enterprise observability platforms, with strong preference for Dynatrace. Proven experience designing, implementing, and scaling Dynatrace-based observability solutions across large, complex, multi-cloud environments with a strong focus on self-service capabilities, automation, and operational excellence.
- Strong grounding in SRE principles (SLIs/SLOs/error budgets), incident command, and observability platforms/APM
- Strong project management and organizational skills.
- Strong expertise in cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, application performance monitoring (APM), log analytics, infrastructure observability, and automation frameworks.
- Proficiency with cloud (AWS), containers/orchestration, IaC (Terraform/CDK), CI/CD with security gates, policy-as-code
- Strong technical background in cloud platforms (AWS preferred), CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation.
- Experience with DevOps toolchains including Jenkins/GitHub Actions, Terraform,
The salary/hourly range is $135,800.00 – $176,040.00. Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, etc. Depending on an employee’s assigned worksite or location, Amtrak may consider a geo-pay differential to be applied to the employee’s base salary. Amtrak may offer additional incentive and pay programs to recognize and reward our employees, including a short-term incentive bonus based upon factors such as individual and company performance that is commensurate with the level of the position.
Health and Wellbeing
Financial and Retirement
Work and Family Life Support
Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance
401K with Employer Match
Generous Paid Time Off
Wellness Programs
Railroad Retirement Benefits
Paid Caregiving Days and Backup Care
Health Savings Account
Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness
Fertility and Family Building Benefits
No-cost Personal Health Advocate
Student Loan Assistance
Adoption and Surrogacy Assistance
Medical Plan Opt-out Credit
Tuition and Education Reimbursement
Paid Family Leave
Life Insurance
Rail Pass Privileges
Short- and Long-term Disability Insurance
Employee Assistance Program
No-cost Financial Advisor Sessions
Commuter and Flexible Spending Accounts
Learn more about our benefits offerings here.
Requisition ID: 167226
Work Arrangement: 02-Remote Optional Click here for more information about work arrangements at Amtrak.
Relocation Offered: No
Travel Requirements: Up to 25%
You power our progress through your performance.
We want your work at Amtrak to be more than a job. We want your career at Amtrak to be a fulfilling experience where you find challenging work, rewarding opportunities, respect among colleagues, and attractive compensation. Amtrak maintains a culture that values high performance and recognizes individual employee contributions.
Amtrak is committed to a safe workplace free of drugs and alcohol. All Amtrak positions requires a pre-employment background check that includes prior employment verification, a criminal history check and a pre-employment drug screen.
Candidates who test positive for marijuana will be disqualified, regardless of any state or local statute, ordinance, regulation, or other law that legalizes or decriminalizes the use or possession of marijuana, whether for medical, recreational, or other use. Amtrak's pre-employment drug testing program is administered in accordance with DOT regulations and applicable law.
In accordance with DOT regulations (49 CFR § 40.25), Amtrak is required to obtain prior drug and alcohol testing records for applicants/employees intending to perform safety-sensitive duties for covered Department of Transportation positions. If an applicant/employee refuses to provide written consent for Amtrak to obtain these records, the individual will not be permitted to perform safety-sensitive functions.
In accordance with federal law governing security checks of covered individuals for providers of public transportation (Title 6 U.S.C. §1143), Amtrak is required to screen applicants for any permanent or interim disqualifying criminal offenses.
Note that any education requirement listed above may be deemed satisfied if you have an equivalent combination of education, training and experience.
Amtrak is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race/color, to include traits historically associated with race, including but not limited to, hair texture and hairstyles such as braids, locks and twists, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related conditions, such as lactation), national origin/ethnicity, disability (intellectual, mental and physical), veteran status, marital status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, genetic information, citizenship or any other personal characteristics protected by law.