Director, Service Reliability Engineering

JOB SUMMARY 

The Director, Service Reliability Engineering is responsible for improving the reliability, resiliency, scalability, and operational excellence of Marriott’s Revenue Management Systems technology domain. This role plays a critical part in Marriott’s reliability transformation, shifting the organization from reactive, centralized operations toward engineering-owned reliability grounded in modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevSecOps practices. This leader serves as a catalyst for change, partnering closely with product, engineering, platform, architecture, and security teams to embed reliability throughout the software development lifecycle. Success is measured by measurable improvements in reliability outcomes, incident reduction, engineering adoption, and operational maturity rather than ownership of ticket queues or production support. 

CANDIDATE PROFILE 

Required: 

• Undergraduate degree in Engineering, Information Systems or Computer Science discipline and/or equivalent experience/certification  

• 8+ years of progressive experience across software engineering, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or related disciplines with a blend of deep technical knowledge and a customer-focused mindset  

• 5+ years leading large-scale engineering or reliability organizations  

• 5+ years managing direct reports and Service Provider teams 

• 3+ years’ experience operating and maintaining a Multi-Cloud environment 

• Demonstrated success driving reliability transformation across multiple engineering domains 

• Deep understanding of cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and modern software delivery 

• Proven ability to influence technical strategy and standards without direct authority 

• Experience defining SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and operational maturity frameworks 

• Strong executive communication skills and systems thinking mindset 

Preferred: 

• Graduate Degree in a technical discipline 

• 8+ years experience leading and engaging highly technical architecture, engineering and operations teams 

• 8+ years of hands on technical experience in infrastructure and/or development teams 

• 5+ years of production level experience in AWS in critical services such as EMR, Aurora, RDS, Document DB, EKS 

• 3+ years experience managing Public Cloud technology stacks such as AWS, Azure, Alibaba, GCP, etc. 

• Demonstrated ability to manage a large, diverse portfolio of technologies and projects, while balancing short-term goals and long-term vision 

• Comfortable applying a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to define success 

• Expert problem solver that is to be able to solve challenges across people, process and technology 

• Ability to build strong relationships and network throughout the broader IT community 

• Experience in the security, implementation and operational support of mission critical products 

• Strong influencing skills and an ability to overcome barriers while driving change 

• Experience in researching emerging technologies and trends, standards, and products 

• Experience in developing technology roadmaps and strategies 

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills for a wide range of audiences including executives, business stakeholders and IT teams 

• Strong knowledge of emerging tools, software, applications, and systems for attaining best-in-class IT technology across the enterprise 

• Strong attention to detail with an ability to operate effectively across multiple priorities 

• ITILv4 certification 

• Experience operating in an Agile or SAFE framework 

• AWS, Azure, Oracle or similar cloud certifications 

• Familiarity with hospitality, travel, retail, or large-scale consumer-facing platforms 

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES 

Domain Reliability Strategy & Transformation 

• Define and execute domain reliability strategies for Revenue Management Systems technology domain 

• Translate enterprise reliability transformation objectives into actionable domain roadmaps 

• Establish service ownership models, service tiering, and reliability targets 

• Identify organizational, process, and technology barriers to reliability adoption and drive remediation 

SRE & DevSecOps Enablement 

• Expand and mature embedded SRE capabilities within domain engineering teams 

• Drive adoption of SLOs, error budgets, production readiness, and operational excellence practices 

• Embed reliability considerations into architecture reviews and CI/CD pipelines 

• Improve deployment safety, change quality, and risk reduction 

Incident Reduction, Resiliency & Learning 

• Lead blameless post-incident reviews and root cause analysis 

• Ensure systemic corrective actions that prevent repeat incidents 

• Promote resiliency engineering practices such as fault isolation and graceful degradation 

• Continuously improve incident response effectiveness and prevention 

Enterprise Engineering Excellence & Automation 

• Promote resiliency engineering practices such as fault isolation and graceful degradation 

• Eliminate operational toil through automation and self-healing systems 

• Establish and prioritize domain reliability backlogs focused on systemic risk reduction 

• Increase engineering leverage through reusable reliability patterns and platforms 

• Advance observability maturity across metrics, logs, and traces 

Enterprise Visibility & Executive Reporting 

• Develop and maintain executive-level reliability scorecards 

• Provide visibility into reliability trends, risk posture, and maturity improvements 

• Connect reliability outcomes to customer experience and business impact 

• Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs to executive leadership 

Service Provider Management 

• Own outcomes of the aligned Service Provider team inclusive of project delivery and operations 

• Make short term plans for the team to effectively utilize resources 

• Facilitate timely resolution of service delivery problems and minimizes the impact to clients 

Managing and Conducting Human Resources Activities 

• Build and lead high-performing Domain Reliability Engineering teams 

• Develop engineering leaders with strong SRE and systems expertise 

• Expand global engineering capabilities, including Hyderabad 

• Lead vendor reduction and transition toward engineering-led reliability models 

• Foster a culture of accountability, learning, and continuous improvement 

• Interviews and hires employees. 

• Promotes the fair and equitable treatment of employees. 

• Facilitates regular, ongoing communication in department (e.g., staff meetings). 

• Fosters employee commitment to providing excellent service, participates in daily stand-up meetings and models desired service behaviors in all interactions with customer and employees. 

• Incorporates customer satisfaction as a component of staff/operations meetings with an emphasis on generating innovative ways to continually improve results. 

• Sets goals and expectations for direct reports using the performance review process and holds staff accountable for performance goals. 

• Solicits employee feedback. 

• Utilizes an “open door policy” and reviews employee satisfaction results to identify and address employee problems or concerns 

• Promotes adherence to policies consistently, follows disciplinary procedures and documents items according to Standard and Local Operating 

Procedures (SOPs and LSOPs) and supports the Peer Review Process. 

• Conducts annual performance appraisal with direct reports according to Standard Operating Procedures. 

• Champions change ensures brand and regional business initiatives are implemented and communicates follow-up actions to team as necessary. 

• Identifies talents of direct reports and their teams and assists with their growth and development plans. 

Success Measures 

• Increased percentage of services operating with defined SLOs and service ownership 

• Reduction in repeat incidents and severity of reliability events 

• Improved change success rates and deployment safety metrics 

• Increased automation and reduction of manual operational toil 

• Demonstrable year-over-year improvements in reliability maturity scores