Lead Site Reliability Engineer

• Design, implement, and support highly available, scalable, and resilient applications and cloud infrastructure following enterprise technology standards and SRE best practices.
• Lead initiatives to improve system reliability, availability, performance, and operational maturity through automation and engineering excellence.
• Define, implement, and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets for critical business services.
• Develop comprehensive observability strategies leveraging Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry (OTel), distributed tracing, metrics, logging, dashboards, and alerting solutions.
• Design and maintain end-to-end monitoring solutions that provide actionable insights into application, infrastructure, and customer experience health.
• Analyze production telemetry to proactively identify performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and capacity constraints.
• Lead incident response activities for high-severity production events, coordinating cross-functional teams to restore services and minimize customer impact.
• Perform and facilitate Root Cause Analysis (RCA) activities, ensuring corrective and preventive actions are identified, prioritized, and implemented.
• Drive operational excellence through automation of repetitive tasks, operational workflows, deployments, recovery procedures, and reliability controls.
• Partner with development teams to build reliable and observable services throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
• Design, develop, and execute automated regression testing strategies to validate application stability, reliability, and performance following deployments and infrastructure changes.
• Review test coverage and reliability validation approaches to ensure comprehensive testing and risk mitigation.
• Create, maintain, and improve Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using Terraform for cloud infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and environment standardization.
• Support and optimize Microsoft Azure environments, including Azure App Services, resource management, scaling strategies, deployment automation, and application lifecycle management.
• Utilize Azure-native tools such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and related services to improve platform visibility and reliability.
• Drive implementation of performance testing, resiliency testing, fault tolerance validation, and disaster recovery preparedness within assigned domains.
• Establish operational readiness standards and ensure applications meet reliability, scalability, observability, and supportability requirements before production deployment.
• Review architectural designs and provide recommendations to improve platform resiliency, operational efficiency, and cloud optimization.
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and workload optimization efforts across production environments.
• Develop and maintain operational runbooks, incident playbooks, knowledge articles, and standard operating procedures.
• Serve as a key partner with engineering, infrastructure, cybersecurity, architecture, and support teams to identify and implement continuous process improvements spanning organizational boundaries.
• Communicate system health, reliability trends, operational risks, and remediation strategies to technical and business stakeholders.
• Present reliability initiatives, operational metrics, and engineering recommendations at architecture reviews, technical forums, and leadership meetings.
• Mentor engineers on observability, cloud engineering, automation, SRE principles, and operational best practices.
• Understand and adhere to the Company’s risk and regulatory standards, policies, and controls in accordance with the Company’s Risk Appetite.
• Identify reliability, operational, and technology risks requiring escalation to management.
• Promote an environment that supports a culture of belonging and reflects the M&T Bank brand.
• Maintain M&T internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit findings and regulatory requirements as applicable.
• Complete other related duties as assigned.

Scope of Responsibilities

Supervisory/Managerial Responsibilities

No supervisory responsibilities. May provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to engineers and project teams.

• Associate’s degree and a minimum of 7 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Systems Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, DevOps, Application Support, or related technology disciplines; OR
• Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 5 years of relevant experience; OR
• In lieu of a degree, a combined minimum of 9 years of education and/or relevant work experience, including a minimum of 5 years in a technology engineering role.

Core Requirements

• Strong experience in observability and monitoring, including hands-on expertise with:
• Dynatrace
• OpenTelemetry (OTel)
• Distributed tracing
• Metrics collection and analysis
• Centralized logging and log aggregation
• Alerting and dashboard development
• Proven experience designing and executing automated regression testing frameworks and test suites to ensure application and platform stability following deployments.
• Strong proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and operational tooling.
• Expert knowledge of production systems monitoring, incident management, and operational troubleshooting.
• Strong understanding of application performance management, distributed systems, and modern cloud-native architectures.

Cloud & Platform Expertise

• Strong experience with Microsoft Azure, including:
• Azure App Services
• Resource Groups
• Azure networking concepts
• Scaling and performance optimization
• Deployment and release management
• Application lifecycle management
• Experience leveraging Azure-native operational tooling such as:
• Azure Monitor
• Application Insights
• Log Analytics
• Azure dashboards and alerting
• Experience supporting cloud-native and hybrid infrastructure environments.

Reliability & Engineering Practices

• Demonstrated experience implementing and operating SRE practices, including:
• Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
• Service Level Indicators (SLIs)
• Error budgets
• Incident management
• Problem management
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
• Reliability automation
• Ability to improve system reliability through:
• Performance tuning
• Capacity planning
• Observability-driven insights
• Proactive issue detection
• Reliability engineering initiatives
• Experience developing automated recovery mechanisms and self-healing solutions.
• Knowledge of resiliency engineering patterns, disaster recovery planning, and high-availability architectures.

Education and Experience Preferred

• Experience supporting large-scale enterprise applications in regulated environments.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills related to production systems and distributed architectures.
• Experience working in Agile and DevOps operating models.
• Ability to work autonomously and lead complex reliability initiatives.
• Strong organizational and time management skills.
• Advanced verbal and written communication skills.
• Experience driving project milestones and delivery commitments.
• Proven experience leading major incident response and post-incident improvement efforts.
• Experience partnering with architecture, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and application development teams.
• Experience with scripting and automation using PowerShell, Python, Bash, or similar technologies.
• Industry certifications in Azure, Terraform, Cloud Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering preferred.