Upstart
Director of Reliability
Job Summary
The role is a strategic leadership position overseeing Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, and operational excellence at Upstart. Responsibilities include ensuring platform uptime, scalability, and security through automation, observability, and incident management. The candidate should have extensive experience in large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, and team leadership. The position emphasizes building resilient systems that support innovation and deliver a seamless customer experience while aligning with business goals.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
About Upstart
Upstart is the leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than 80% of borrowers are approved instantly, with zero documentation to upload.
Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.
Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!
The Team
As the Director of Reliability, you’ll be the strategic force ensuring our platform is not only always-on but relentlessly performant, and scalable. You’ll lead the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Compute, Quality, Runtime and Deployment teams to build resilient systems all while championing automation, observability, and incident excellence. This role is at the heart of Upstart’s mission: making credit more accessible and fair by ensuring the tech behind it never misses a beat.
Your leadership will transform how we build, deploy, and maintain reliable systems, ensuring our technology is an enabler rather than a bottleneck. As the driving force behind resilient and scalable infrastructure, you will enable our company to deliver exceptional customer experiences, support innovation, and sustain long-term growth.
This isn’t just an operational role—it’s a strategic leadership position that will define the future of our platform’s reliability and performance.
How you’ll make an impact:
- You will proactively prevent downtime and service disruptions by implementing robust monitoring, alerting, and automation strategies.
- Your efforts in optimizing system performance will improve response times, reduce latency, and enhance overall customer satisfaction.
- By championing automation and observability, you will reduce manual toil and free up engineering teams to focus on innovation.
- Your leadership will help create self-healing systems, reducing the need for reactive firefighting and improving developer productivity.
- You will lead the development of a world-class incident response process, ensuring quick resolution of outages and minimizing business impact.
- You will empower teams with SRE best practices, breaking down silos between development, operations, and security teams.
- By aligning SRE initiatives with business objectives, you will help balance reliability with speed of innovation, ensuring that engineering teams can ship features quickly without sacrificing stability.
- Your contributions will directly support revenue growth by reducing service disruptions and ensuring a seamless user experience
What we’re looking for:
- Minimum requirements:
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering, with at least 5+ years in a leadership role.
- Proven experience leading large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems with a focus on reliability, scalability, and security.
- Expertise in cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Strong background in observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or Splunk.
- Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Strong understanding of networking, security, and performance optimization.
- Demonstrated success in building high-performing SRE teams and implementing best practices.
- Preferred qualifications:
- Experience building and leading teams that deliver big impact
- Experience developing and maintaining large scale distributed systems in AWS
- Ability to influence and lead others without direct authority
- Strong product and analytical mindset that allows you to think in terms of ROI, risk, and trade offs
- Experience working at companies that have gone through periods of rapid business or organizational growth while maintaining high standards
Position Location - This role is available in the following locations: Remote, San Mateo, Columbus, Austin
Time Zone Requirements - This team operates on the East/West Coast time zones.
Travel Requirements - As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; the Engineering team meets quarterly for 4-5 consecutive days at a time.
What you'll love:
- Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart
- 401(k) with 100% company match up to $4,500 and immediate vesting and after-tax savings
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
- Life and disability insurance
- Generous holiday, vacation, sick and safety leave
- Supportive parental, family care, and military leave programs
- Annual wellness, technology & ergonomic reimbursement programs
- Social activities including team events and onsites, all-company updates, employee resource groups (ERGs), and other interest groups such as book clubs, fitness, investing, and volunteering
- Catered lunches + snacks & drinks when working in offices
#LI-REMOTE
#LI-Director
At Upstart, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. The anticipated base salary for this position is expected to be within the below range. Your actual base pay will depend on your geographic location–with our “digital first” philosophy, Upstart uses compensation regions that vary depending on location. Individual pay is also determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
In addition, Upstart provides employees with target bonuses, equity compensation, and generous benefits packages (including medical, dental, vision, and 401k).
Upstart is a proud Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to ensuring that underrepresented classes receive better access to affordable credit, and are just as committed to embracing diversity and inclusion in our hiring practices. We celebrate all cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, and know that we can only become better together.
If you require reasonable accommodation in completing an application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please email [email protected]
Upstart
A lending platform using AI to provide personal loans and credit solutions with a focus on fair and fast approvals.
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