AI-DNA SVP of Site Reliability Engineering

Role overview

This leadership role is centered on building and running an AI-native site reliability function for Khoros, a major enterprise SaaS platform under IgniteTech. The operating approach is agent-driven: AI systems are expected to investigate incidents, validate likely causes from prior outages and root-cause analyses, analyze logs and code paths, detect the failure pattern, and either recommend or execute fixes within defined policy boundaries. The position is designed for a senior operator who can own reliability outcomes while also shaping the AI agent system that powers the team.

The team is intentionally compact, highly experienced, and fully remote. The successful leader will treat customer uptime as a direct business responsibility, maintain firm standards for agent behavior, and help define a model for agentic SRE that is still emerging across the industry.

What you will do

• Take end-to-end ownership of reliability and customer experience for an AI-native community and social engagement platform, with a focus on improving uptime, reducing mean time to recovery, and increasing customer satisfaction over time. You will be the senior leader on major customer incidents and escalations.
• Architect, supervise, and keep expanding the AI agent system that performs operational work such as early triage, alert creation, change-validation checks, permanent fix follow-up, customer-facing root-cause analysis drafting, and auto-healing for approved actions.
• Lead a small, senior, distributed SRE / SaaS / DevOps team across time zones, with no L1 or L2 layer beneath them. Every engineer is expected to build agents, author runbooks, and manage the incident loop from start to finish.
• Remain actively hands-on by leading major outage bridges when needed, producing RCAs, and contributing production agent code. A meaningful portion of your time will be spent building and maintaining the agent surface yourself.
• Represent the operations function directly to enterprise customer leadership and the CEO, tying reliability work to retention, revenue protection, and customer experience.
• Define and enforce the quality bar for production agents, including scope definition, measured acceptance rates, escape hatches, and guardrails linked to known failure modes.
• Build, develop, and retain a senior-only team, with hiring approached as selective long-term relationship building rather than high-volume recruitment.
• Collaborate closely with product engineering and customer success to ensure the operating layer supports both platform reliability and customer outcomes.
• Stay continuously aware of platform health by interpreting incident history, status dashboards, SLA metrics, and other operational signals in real time.

What this role is not

• This is not a headcount-scaling exercise; if a problem can be solved by improving the AI system, that is the preferred path.
• This is not a presentation-heavy executive role. The expectation is to be actively coding, bridge-leading, and working inside the agent system.
• You will not own product engineering or customer support.
• The goal is not to optimize ticket volume as a primary metric.
• You will not sit on every incident call. You lead critical events personally, while routine execution is handled by the operator layer and the AI system.
• This role is about ownership and intensity, not title collection or résumé value.

Requirements

• Strong ownership mindset, with a tendency to run operations as if the business, customers, and reputation were your own.
• 10+ years of SaaS operations experience at substantial scale, including at least 3 years in an SVP, VP, or Head-level role leading a senior engineering organization.
• AI-first operating experience, including production work on AIOps, agentic incident response, or auto-remediation systems.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or similar products.
• Deep AWS production expertise in large, real-world environments spanning multiple availability zones and multiple accounts.
• Hands-on senior leadership style: comfortable driving outages, writing RCAs, shipping code, and evaluating agent designs directly.
• Clear record of improving reliability and customer experience while maintaining or reducing headcount.
• Advanced English communication skills for direct interaction with the CEO and enterprise customer executives.
• Availability for overlap with US morning hours, approximately 13:00–17:00 UTC.
• Residency in an OFAC-clear country.

Preferred background

• Public thought leadership in agentic SRE, harness-over-headcount models, or AI replacing operational work, such as posts, talks, articles, or open-source contributions.
• Evidence of sustained depth in one demanding pursuit outside mainstream work, whether a side project, open-source effort, or unusual hobby.
• Experience with multi-tenant B2B SaaS platforms at scale, especially in communities, social platforms, customer experience, observability, AIOps, or developer tools.
• Practical familiarity with incident and observability tools such as Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, OpsGenie, PagerDuty, Datadog, or similar platforms.

Working conditions

The environment combines enterprise-scale responsibility with startup-like speed. Decisions are expected in days rather than committees, and performance is measured week by week instead of only at the quarterly level.

The team is fully remote, async-first, and globally distributed. Hiring is open to candidates anywhere, provided there is overlap with US morning hours. There is no office requirement and no junior support layer underneath the team.

Tooling and compute are not artificially constrained. The right solution may involve more inference, additional compute, a better model, or another tool if that is what the job needs.

Learning opportunity

You will help create one of the first enterprise-scale operating functions built from the ground up as AI-native. The work will involve defining what works, documenting what does not, and influencing the broader playbook for this emerging field.

Additional information

The role is based in the United Arab Emirates and is structured as a full-time remote position. The employer expects the leader to operate with founder-level accountability for reliability, customer trust, and operational excellence.