REO Resiliency Engineering and Quality Leader; Hybrid

* At Securian Financial the internal position title is Infrastructure Dir."

Mission

"To lead the engineering discipline that ensures Securian's technology platforms and cloud services are built and operated with uncompromising resilience, performance, and quality. This role drives the design and automation of fault-tolerant, high-availability architectures across AWS, Azure, and GCP-ensuring the enterprise meets resiliency, scalability, and efficiency expectations at every layer of technology."

Positioning

The Director of Resilience Engineering and Quality Leader is both a strategic peer and technical counterpart to the Infrastructure & Reliability Engineering Leader.

This role provides bench depth and succession coverage for REO's most technically complex domains while driving innovation in reliability, resilience, and performance practices.

• Strategic influence:
  Shapes cloud reliability, quality engineering, and resilience strategy across REO and Architecture domains.

• Operational authority:
  Leads Sr. Managers and Managers who own the execution of quality, resilience, and performance engineering capabilities.

• Enterprise collaboration:
  Works hand-in-hand with Technology, Solution, Business, Data, and Enterprise Architects to embed reliability and resilience as core architecture principles.

Scope of Accountability

Resilience Engineering & Cloud Reliability

• Architect and validate fault-tolerant, regionally resilient architectures across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Own resilience automation, chaos testing, and IaC-based recovery validation.

• Lead cross-cloud reliability design reviews and failure-mode analyses for critical systems.

Quality Engineering & Continuous Testing

• Define enterprise-wide quality engineering strategy integrated into CI/CD pipelines.

• Drive automation-first testing (functional, non-functional, performance, resilience).

• Embed observability-driven quality validation and contract testing across services.

Performance, Capacity & Efficiency Engineering

• Oversee predictive capacity planning, scaling automation, and cost/efficiency optimization (Fin Ops/Green Ops).

• Partner with Platform & Infrastructure teams to tune performance across application and platform layers.

• Measure and report on performance SLIs/SLAs aligned to REO's Reliability Metrics framework.

Cross-Domain Architecture Collaboration

• Partner with Enterprise Architects to codify resilience and reliability standards in technology blueprints.

• Collaborate with Technology & Solution Architects to design service reliability into delivery architectures.

• Engage Data Architects for data resilience, replication, and pipeline reliability.

• Work with Business Architects to align technical reliability goals with critical business outcomes.

Leadership & Talent Development

• Lead a team of Sr. Managers and Managers, fostering a high-performance, hands-on engineering culture.

• Build and mentor top-tier technical talent in cloud reliability, resilience, and quality automation.

• Partner with HR and REO Enablement to develop succession plans and technical competency frameworks.

Core Technical Competencies

• AWS (primary) - Multi-account design, HA architecture, region failover, resilience automation, Terraform/CDK/Cloud Formation.

• Azure & GCP (secondary) - Compute, networking, and reliability constructs; hybrid cloud design and failover integration.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - Deep proficiency in Terraform, policy-as-code (OPA/Conftest), drift detection, pipeline integration.

• Reliability & Chaos Engineering - AWS Fault Injection Simulator, Gremlin, steady-state hypothesis design.

• Observability & Quality Automation - Open Telemetry, Prometheus, Cloud Watch, K6, Gatling; CI/CD quality gates and dashboards.

• Performance Engineering - Load, stress, and soak testing automation; performance profiling and SLO alignment.

• Disaster Recovery Automation - Cross-region orchestration, IaC-driven DR runs, replication validation.

• Fin Ops/Green Ops - Cloud cost and efficiency automation, carbon-aware scaling policies.

Leadership Competencies

• Strategic Technical Leadership:
  Operates at the intersection of deep engineering and executive strategy.

• Multi-Domain Collaborator:
  Integrates reliability and resilience across architecture, operations, and business domains.

• Talent Multiplier:
  Develops and empowers senior managers, fostering engineering mastery and innovation.

• Credible Technical Authority:
  Trusted peer to Infrastructure & Reliability Engineering; capable of leading architecture reviews and executive briefings.

• Change Champion:
  Drives transformation of reliability practices across platforms, pipelines, and teams.

Qualifications & Experience

• 12+ years in cloud engineering, reliability, or platform leadership roles.

• 5+ years leading Sr. Managers/Managers in technical domains.

• Proven expertise across AWS, with working knowledge of Azure and GCP.

• Experience with multi-cloud governance, DR design, IaC at scale, and reliability automation.

• Strong understanding of observability, SRE principles, and REO/ITIL-aligned reliability…