Site Reliability Engineer, Team Lead

Site Reliability Engineer, Team Lead (Player‑Coach)

Why Join Omnicell?

About This Opportunity:

Omnicell is building a Global Cloud Operations organization from the ground up as our business shifts from on-premise, hardware-centric products to a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered platform that hospitals depend on 24/7. The Site Reliability Engineering function is the reliability engine of that organization, and this role is the first senior SRE hire — the person who will design the practice, set the standards, and then run the plays themselves until the team is large enough to delegate.

This is not a role where reliability practices already exist and you tune them. It is a role where you define what good looks like for Omnicell: which services have SLOs and at what targets, how incidents are declared and commanded, what the on-call rotation feels like, which observability platform we standardize on, and how reliability investment is prioritized against feature velocity. You will make those calls in partnership with the VP of Global Cloud Operations and an Engineer III SRE you will coach and grow.

The environment is hybrid. Some of our products are still hardware in hospitals communicating with cloud services; others are fully SaaS. Some customers access us over private circuits, others over the public internet. We operate in a regulated environment — HIPAA, SOC 2, and in some engagements FedRAMP — which means reliability, security, and auditability are not separable concerns. The person we hire will be comfortable with that complexity and will help the organization design for it rather than around it.

This role also anchors Omnicell's forward investment in AI-driven operations. Over the course of the first year, the organization intends to incorporate AIOps and ML-assisted observability — anomaly detection, intelligent alert correlation, LLM-assisted runbook generation — into how we monitor and respond to our platform. You will be the technical owner of how that gets introduced, prioritized against foundational reliability work, and validated in a regulated environment.

What You’ll Do

Primary Impact

Reliability Practice & Operating Model

• Define and publish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for the top 5–10 Tier‑1 customer‑facing services in partnership with Product and Engineering.
• Design Omnicell’s incident command structure, including severity definitions, declaration criteria, war‑room protocols, stakeholder communications, and post‑incident review standards.
• Establish and operationalize a sustainable on‑call model, including fair rotations, paging discipline, escalation paths, and coordination with managed service partners (IBM, HCL).

• Partner with the VP to migrate the interim incident response RACI — currently held by matrixed individuals across IT, Engineering, Support, and Enterprise Security — into a durable SRE-owned model.

• Select and stand up the primary observability platform, preferring extension of existing Omnicell contracts (DataDog, IBM/Instana, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or other tooling already in use) over net-new procurement. Define the instrumentation standards all new services must meet.

• Develop and track operational KPIs (e.g., MTTR, SLO attainment, change‑failure rate, incident recurrence, cost per workload) and present reliability insights and roadmaps in executive Cloud Ops reviews.

Hands‑On Engineering & Incident Leadership

• Instrument Tier‑1 services directly—building dashboards, alerts, and runbooks yourself.
• Participate in on‑call rotations and command Sev‑1 and Sev‑2 incidents, leading blameless postmortems and driving corrective actions to completion.

• Contribute production code and infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform preferred) to the platform. Oversee the design and evolution of the CI/CD pipelines - current stack is Codefresh, Teamcity,  Github Actions, and Octopus Deploy, and we are consolidating over time

• Administer and scale our Kubernetes platform, including secure and compliant cluster configurations. Working knowledge of Docker, Helm, and Service Mesh (Istio or Linkerd) expected.

• Plan and execute chaos and failover exercises to validate real‑world resilience.

AI‑Driven Operations

• Architect Omnicell’s AIOps strategy, evaluating ML‑based anomaly detection, alert correlation, automated root‑cause analysis, and LLM‑assisted runbooks.
• Make disciplined build‑versus‑buy decisions and integrate AI tooling only where it delivers measurable reliability gains.
• Ensure AI‑assisted operations meet auditability, explainability, and compliance requirements (HIPAA, SOC 2).

Coaching & Team Building

• Serve as formal coach to an Engineer III SRE, pairing on incidents, reviewing designs proposals, and supporting growth toward senior levels.
• Design the next 2–4 SRE hires, including role definitions, interview loops, and hiring decisions.
• Represent SRE in architecture reviews, launch readiness assessments, and cross‑functional reliability discussions.

What Success looks like in the first six months

Concrete outcomes this role will be evaluated against in the first half-year. These are drawn from the Cloud Ops 90-day plan and its extension into the following quarter.

• Month 1: SLOs drafted for the top 5 Tier-1 services with Product sign-off. Severity rubric published. First live tabletop Sev-1 run against the interim RACI.

• Month 2: Observability platform selection finalized. Instrumentation standard published. Engineer III SRE hired and onboarded.

• Month 3: On-call rotation live. First real Sev-1 commanded under the new structure with a blameless postmortem completed and follow-ups tracked.

• Month 4–6: Error budget policy in effect for the first 3 services. First incident review at executive level. Interview loop running for the next SRE hires. Initial AIOps evaluation and pilot scope defined.

Who You Are

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field OR equivalent experience

• 7+ years of experience in software or platform engineering, with at least 4 of those in an SRE, DevOps, or platform reliability role.

• At least 2 years of formal technical leadership, tech-lead, or staff-level experience with mentorship responsibilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven experience leading SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering teams in a cloud-native production environment — with demonstrated experience building a practice from zero or near-zero: you have set SLOs, defined incident command, and introduced error budget thinking to an organization that did not have it.

• Deep hands-on expertise with at least one major public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including networking, IAM, and managed services.

• Strong background in CI/CD pipeline design and management (familiarity with CodeFresh, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, TeamCity, or equivalent).

• Experience implementing Infrastructure as Code using Terraform (preferred), Chef, Puppet, or similar tools.

• Proficiency in Python or another object-oriented programming language for automation, tooling, and production services.

• Experience administering and scaling Kubernetes clusters, including secure and compliant platform configurations. Working knowledge of Docker, Helm, and Service Mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd).

• Hands-on experience designing modern observability platforms using tools such as DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch/Kibana, or equivalent — with an opinion about what a good telemetry stack looks like.

• Familiarity with integrating AI/ML-based anomaly detection, alerting, or LLM-assisted triage pipelines — or strong conviction about where AIOps should and should not be applied in a regulated environment.

• Real incident command experience for customer-impacting Sev-1 events, with blameless postmortem practice and documented follow-up discipline.

• Ability to coach and mentor, with direct evidence of growing junior and mid-level engineers. You will eventually have 1 direct report.

• Comfort operating in a regulated environment where reliability and compliance (HIPAA, SOC 2) are inseparable.

How You’ll Elevate at Omnicell

• Collaborate: Partner deeply with Product, Platform Engineering, Support, Security, and managed service providers to align reliability with business priorities.
• Inspire: Lead by example during high‑stakes incidents and influence teams toward a culture of ownership, learning, and resilience.
• Develop: Invest in the growth of your SRE peers through coaching, pairing, and thoughtful technical leadership.
• Execute: Set clear priorities, make informed trade‑offs, and deliver durable reliability improvements.
• Impact: Shape how Omnicell operates for years to come by defining the standards, tools, and practices of our SRE function.

Leadership Imperatives (Player‑Coach Role)

• Modeling a growth mindset and continuous learning.
• Acting as a talent activator through formal coaching and mentorship.
• Being an impact maker who connects reliability investment to business and patient outcomes.
• Serving as a change champion as Omnicell transitions to cloud‑first operations.

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