Sr. Manager, Cloud Engineering & Operations

Job Description

ABOUT THE ROLE

Accela provides cutting-edge technology that empowers government agencies to better serve their communities. At the core of our solutions is the Civic Cloud Platform, enabling a robust ecosystem of development and business partners to deliver innovative public sector services.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Accela blends software engineering with cloud operations to ensure platform reliability, scalability, security, and performance. As Senior Manager, SRE, you will lead a high-performing team responsible for protecting and advancing the availability and resilience of Accela’s Civic Platform Services.

This role also oversees our Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) function — a customer-facing SRE discipline focused on successful implementations, complex migrations, and technically challenging integrations. You will partner closely with Engineering, Security, Product, and Customer Success to ensure operational excellence at scale.

As part of the Cloud Engineering and Operations leadership team, you will actively shape our Production Development Lifecycle (PDLC), mature our incident and change management practices, and drive strategic improvements across our Azure-based SaaS infrastructure.

SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES:

Team Leadership & Development

• Hire, develop, and retain a high-performing team of SREs and CREs
• Establish clear performance expectations, career paths, and technical standards
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Serve as a mentor to senior engineers and emerging leaders

Operational Excellence

• Own reliability outcomes across availability, performance, security, and compliance
• Serve as executive escalation point for high-severity production incidents
• Lead incident response strategy, root cause analysis (RCA), and corrective action planning
• Mature Incident, Problem, and Change Management processes

Technical Strategy & Execution

• Drive automation initiatives in partnership with DevOps, Security, and Database Engineering
• Oversee infrastructure scalability and resiliency across Microsoft Azure
• Champion Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and configuration management (Ansible) standards
• Improve observability through robust dashboards, metrics, logging, and monitoring practices

Cross-Functional & Executive Engagement

• Partner with Product and Engineering to integrate reliability early in the PDLC
• Engage executive leadership with operational metrics, risk posture, and strategic roadmaps
• Manage vendor and partner relationships supporting SaaS production environments
• Align reliability strategy with business growth and public sector compliance requirements

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 10–12+ years of experience in software engineering and/or production systems engineering within a SaaS environment
• 3–5+ years of people leadership experience managing technical teams
• Proven track record of building, scaling, and retaining high-performing engineering teams
• Strong executive communication skills with experience presenting operational metrics and strategy
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, system design, and troubleshooting complex production environments
• Experience operating in Microsoft Azure environments
• Experience in Linux environments and software version control systems
• Strong scripting capability (Bash, Python, Ruby, or Go)
• Mastery of production monitoring, logging, and observability tools
• Demonstrated ability to lead full-stack incident response and root cause analysis

Travel Requirements

• Approximately 10% travel for team offsites, cross-functional planning sessions, executive meetings, and customer or incident-related engagements as needed.

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience operating containerized platforms (AKS, ECS, or similar) at scale
• Azure CLI/API expertise
• Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform preferred)
• Configuration management experience (Ansible preferred)
• PowerShell experience

ABOUT ACCELA
For nearly 20 years, Accela has been an industry leader in designing and delivering government software to improve efficiency, increase citizen engagement and enable the development of thriving communities. Today, citizens are savvy to how services should be delivered, and expect a consistently convenient, openly transparent view into their local government. While government agencies struggle to do more with less, our mission has never been more critical. Accela provides a robust, cloud-based platform of government software solutions that accelerate growth, efficiency, and transparency in communities of all sizes. From planning, to building, to service request management and more, Accela’s SaaS offerings level the playing field for small and medium governments and enable smaller agencies to leverage larger city technologies. Our open and flexible technology helps agencies address specific needs today, while ensuring they are well prepared for the emerging challenges of the future.

OUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
Accela believes in developing and nurturing a workplace community where our differences are celebrated, and everyone feels a sense of psychological safety and belonging. Accela is committed to putting resources and attention towards evolving our practices, policies, and philosophies to enable diversity to thrive and to support equity in opportunity for everyone.

COMPENSATION AND WELL-BEING
The annual base salary range for this full-time position is $180,000 - $200,000. The actual annual base salary offered may be adjusted based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, location, education, skills, training, and experience. In addition to an annual base salary, this position is eligible for an annual bonus target. This is a discretionary bonus awarded based on company and individual goal achievement.

Accela’s U.S. team members will receive a generous benefits package consisting of options including flexible time off, comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, family planning benefits, 401(k) retirement savings plan with company match, health savings account with company contributions, flexible spending account, life, accident, and disability coverage, business travel insurance, employee assistance programs, and other well-being benefits.

Accela is an Equal Opportunity Employer/Affirmative Action Employer and will respond to requests for job accommodations.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, national origin, protected veteran status, or based on disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation

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