Head of Site Reliability Engineering

Why should you join dLocal? dLocal enables the biggest companies in the world to collect payments in 40 countries in emerging markets. Global brands rely on us to increase conversion rates and simplify payment expansion effortlessly. As both a payments processor and a merchant of record where we operate, we make it possible for our merchants to make inroads into the world’s fastest-growing, emerging markets.  By joining us you will be a part of an amazing global team that makes it all happen. Being a part of dLocal means working with 1000+ teammates from 30+ different nationalities and developing an international career that impacts millions of people’s daily lives. We are builders, we never run from a challenge, we are customer-centric, and if this sounds like you, we know you will thrive in our team. What's the opportunity? As we continue to grow globally and increase the complexity and scale of our systems, we’re strengthening our focus on Site Reliability Engineering. We are looking for a Head of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to lead the SRE division and take end‑to‑end ownership of reliability across our platform. In this role, you will: Define and drive the SRE strategy, vision, and roadmap for dLocal. Lead and grow a multi‑region SRE organization, including SRE Technical Referents and engineers at different seniority levels. Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Platform leaders to ensure we can scale safely, with clear reliability guardrails and strong operational excellence. This is a high‑impact, hands‑on leadership role reporting to VP of Cloud Platform for someone who can move comfortably between strategy, architecture, and execution, while coaching and empowering a senior, distributed team. What will you do?

Strategy and leadership

• Own the global reliability strategy for dLocal’s platforms and services, aligning SRE goals with company and product objectives.

• Define and socialize SRE standards and principles (SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, error budgets, production readiness, incident management practices, capacity planning, etc.).

• Lead the SRE division: set org structure, define roles and scopes, and drive hiring, performance, and career development.

• Build a culture of high ownership, continuous improvement, and data‑driven decisions across all reliability‑related work.

Reliability, operations, and observability

• Ensure our most critical systems meet or exceed availability, latency, and performance targets.

• Oversee and continuously evolve incident management (on‑call strategy, incident response, communication, postmortems, follow‑ups, and KPIs).

• Own the strategy for observability and monitoring (metrics, logs, traces) and alerting across all environments, including tool selection, standards, and adoption.

• Drive operational excellence: reduce toil via automation, improve deployment safety, and standardize production practices across teams.

Architecture and technical direction

• Partner with Architecture, Platform, and Product Engineering leaders to define reliable, scalable architectures for our core systems and critical flows.

• Guide the adoption of best practices in automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) across SRE and dependent engineering teams.

• Sponsor and oversee large cross‑team reliability programs, such as major observability migrations, resilience testing frameworks, or reliability improvements for key products.

• Provide senior technical leadership on capacity planning, performance engineering, resilience and disaster recovery.

People and cross‑functional collaboration

• • Lead, mentor, and coach SRE Leader, Technical Referents, and senior ICs, helping them grow in both technical depth and leadership.

  • Collaborate closely with:

    • Product & Engineering to balance feature delivery and reliability.

    • Security, Cloud Platform, and Infrastructure to ensure secure and robust foundations.

    • Business stakeholders (e.g., Operations, Support, Commercial) to align on reliability expectations and SLAs.

    • Communicate clearly about risk, trade‑offs, and priorities to both technical and non‑technical audiences, including senior leadership.

Which skill do you need?

Must‑have

• Solid experience leading SRE / Production Engineering / Platform teams in high‑availability, high‑scale environments (fintech, payments, or similarly critical domains is a plus).

• Proven track record managing managers and senior ICs, building and scaling distributed technical teams.

• Deep hands‑on expertise in:

  • Reliability engineering: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, resilience and disaster recovery.

  • Incident management: on‑call models, incident response, postmortems, continuous improvement of incident processes.

  • Observability and monitoring: metrics, logs, traces, alerting strategies, and ecosystem of tools.

  • Automation and IaC: strong familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code.

  • Ability to shape technical strategy, translate it into a clear roadmap, and ensure consistent execution across multiple teams.

  • Excellent communication and influencing skills; comfortable driving alignment across Engineering, Product, and non‑technical stakeholders.

  • Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills, able to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast‑changing contexts.

  • Professional proficiency in English; comfortable working in a global, multi‑time‑zone, multicultural environment.

  Nice to have

  • Experience in payments / fintech or other regulated, mission‑critical industries.

  • Hands‑on background as an SRE, Senior/Staff Engineer, or Platform Engineer before moving into leadership.

  • Experience implementing or maturing:

    • Centralized observability platforms and unified alerting strategies.

    • Standardized production readiness reviews and reliability sign‑off processes.

    • Chaos engineering / resilience testing practices.