Manager Site Reliability Engineering

At the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, employees come first - that’s why we offer a highly competitive compensation and bonus package, and access to a comprehensive benefits program designed to meet the needs of our employees.   C ollaborative, in-office operating model Retirement program (401k and Pension)   Medical, dental and vision insurance   Lifestyle Spending Account   Competitive PTO plan   11 paid holidays per year ​ Who we are Our mission at FHLBank Chicago: To partner with our members in Illinois and Wisconsin to provide them competitively priced funding, a reasonable return on their investment, and support for their community investment activities. Simply said, we're a bank for banks and other financial institutions, focused on being a strategic partner for our members and working together to reinvest in our communities, from urban centers to rural areas. Created by Congress in 1932, FHLBank Chicago is one of 11 Federal Home Loan Banks, government sponsored in support of mortgage lending and community investment. What it’s like to work here At FHLBank Chicago, we bring people together. We are committed to a high performing, engaged workforce, and to supporting the communities we serve across Illinois and Wisconsin. Our Buddy Program pairs new hires with tenured employees to guide their onboarding. Our professional development and training opportunities through upskilling, mentorship programs, and tuition reimbursement allow employees to grow their career with us. Our collaborative, in-office operating model brings teams together to foster innovation, connection, and shared success. To support balance and flexibility, employees are provided an allocation of remote days to use as needed throughout the year What you'll do We are building a new Site Reliability Engineering function and seeking a leader who can establish SRE practices across the organization while developing a team of engineers new to the discipline. This is a unique opportunity to shape how reliability engineering is practiced at FHLBank Chicago from the ground up. The SRE team operates as a guiding and consultative partner to application and development teams rather than owning systems directly. Success in this role requires technical credibility, strong influencing skills, and the ability to drive change through collaboration and education rather than direct authority. This role is accountable for building and leading the SRE team, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and development of engineers transitioning into SRE practices. The manager establishes the SRE operating model (how SRE engages with application and development teams), ensures sustainable on-call and learning culture, and drives adoption of reliability standards through collaboration and influence. How you'll make an impact Shape how Reliability Engineering is practiced and enforced across the Bank through collaboration Build deep relationships between IT and the greater organization in support of common goals Provide direction and development guidance to a team of 3-4 members in this new space Deepen further automation into application availability and reporting processes What you can expect Team Leadership and Development Build and develop a team of engineers transitioning from traditional operations and systems administration backgrounds into SRE practices Create psychological safety that enables learning, experimentation, and honest discussion of failures Establish career development paths and growth opportunities within the SRE discipline Foster a culture of blameless postmortems and continuous improvement Reliability Engineering Practice Define and implement Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budget policies across critical services Establish pager budgets and on-call practices that are sustainable and effective Lead tuning and optimization of monitoring, alerting, and observability tooling Drive reduction of system disruptions through automation, tooling, and process improvement Develop and maintain incident management processes, including severity classification and escalation procedures Participate in FHLBank’s Disaster Recovery process and testing, coordinating and executing regularly scheduled DR exercises Consultation and Partnership Participate in troubleshooting meetings and production incidents, providing expert guidance and recommendations Partner with application owners, product owners, and development teams to improve system reliability Ensure deep technical analysis is performed for significant reliability issues, and provide escalation support as needed; coach the team in translating findings into actionable recommendations. Advocate for reliability investments and help teams prioritize reliability work against feature development Build relationships that enable SRE to influence architectural and operational decisions without direct ownership Organizational Leadership Secure and maintain executive sponsorship and governance mechanisms required for SLO and error budget practices (including defined decision rights when reliability thresholds are breached). Communicate the value and principles of SRE to leadership, helping secure sustained support and appropriate resource allocation Develop metrics and reporting that demonstrate SRE impact on business outcomes Navigate organizational dynamics to build credibility and trust for a new function Align SRE practices with existing compliance, risk management, and regulatory requirements What you'll bring 2+ years of Site Reliability Engineering or directly-related primary function 5+ years of experience in infrastructure, operations, DevOps 2+ years of people management experience, with demonstrated ability to develop and grow technical talent Strong technical foundation in systems administration, networking, and infrastructu