Director- Site Reliability Engineering

About this Role

Job Title: Director- Site Reliability Engineering

Location: Saskatoon

At Vendasta, we're leading the AI revolution from right here in Saskatoon-and beyond. We work together to empower our partners and customers through our AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform to help them get more customers-and keep them. We're proud to share that Vendasta has officially been named one of Canada's Most Admired Corporate Cultures for 2025!

We're looking for a Director of SRE who is energized by owning and being accountable for the unit economics of running our platform, treating cost as a first-class reliability concern, and excited to contribute to AI-powered features that enhance our platform. In this role, you'll play a key part in helping small and medium-sized businesses succeed-while shaping the future of AI for local economies.

Your Impact

As a Director of SRE, you'll work with engineering teams, QA, and product managers to:

• Build and maintain dashboards that track daily, weekly, and monthly spend across every system required to run our products: cloud compute and storage (GCP, AWS), observability (Datadog), CDN and media transcoding, LLM and inference providers, third-party APIs, data warehousing, and SaaS infrastructure tools.

• Establish baseline cost-per-unit metrics (cost per partner, per SMB account, per AI agent run, per API call) and alert on deviations before they become surprises in the monthly close.

• Investigate anomalies the same day they surface, own the root cause analysis, and write up findings the finance and engineering leadership team can act on.

• Implement hard and soft spending limits across every cost center: budget alerts, quota caps, rate limits, and circuit breakers on expensive operations (model calls, transcoding jobs, data egress).

• Design and roll out cost-aware deployment gates so a team cannot ship a change that 10x's a line item without explicit review.

• Maintain a runbook of "kill switches" for runaway scenarios, tested quarterly.

• Continuously evaluate the build-vs-buy posture for every meaningful line item and lead investigations into replacing high-cost vendors with open-source or self-hosted alternatives.

• Identify business and product changes that reduce cost of revenue: tier-based feature gating, model routing, caching layers, data lifecycle policies, reserved capacity, committed-use discounts, and contract renegotiation.

• Build the business case for each initiative: projected savings, implementation effort, risk, and payback period, driving the work through to measurable savings.

• Partner with Finance on monthly close, gross margin reporting, and forecasting to make sure engineering decisions are visible in the financial model.

• Work directly with product and platform engineering teams to embed cost-awareness into design reviews, architecture decisions, and on-call practices.

• Report regularly to the CEO and leadership team on cost-of-revenue trends, risks, and the savings pipeline.

• Complete an inventory of cost of revenue line items, identify owners, set daily dashboards live, and size the top three cost-reduction opportunities within the first 90 days.

• Deploy hard limits and alerts across every material spend category, ensure no surprise overruns in the monthly close, and ship at least one major reduction initiative within the first 6 months.

• Drive measurable, sustained improvement in gross margin attributable to your work, maintaining a documented and prioritized savings pipeline.

What You Bring to the Table

• 5+ years in SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps roles operating production SaaS systems at meaningful scale.

• Deep hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (GCP preferred, AWS or Azure acceptable), including its billing, quotas, and cost management tooling.

• Demonstrable track record of taking cost out of a production system, with specific numbers outlining savings driven, trade-offs made, and lessons learned.

• Strong fluency in observability and monitoring stacks (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and a clear point of view on where each is worth what it costs.

• Comfort writing code to automate cost analysis and enforcement (Python, Go, or similar).

• Solid SQL skills for cutting cost data against business dimensions.

• A FinOps mindset: treating cost as an engineering discipline, not a quarterly cleanup exercise.

• FinOps Foundation certification or equivalent experience (Nice-to-have).

• Experience operating LLM and AI inference workloads in production, including model routing, prompt caching, and provider arbitrage (Nice-to-have).

• Experience evaluating, migrating off, or self-hosting major SaaS infrastructure tools (Nice-to-have).

• Familiarity with media transcoding pipelines and CDN economics (Nice-to-have).

• Experience working alongside Finance on SaaS metrics such as gross margin, cost of revenue, and unit economics (Nice-to-have).

• Ability to communicate clearly and effectively in written and verbal formats.

Perks

Join the Vendasta team, where your well-being and growth come first. Step into a workplace that blends competitive health benefits with true flexibility, including flex time and an annual work-from-anywhere policy. Take ownership of your future with our Employee Options Program, and enjoy daily snacks, a vibrant cafeteria, and catered Friday lunches. Invest in your growth through education reimbursement, in-house learning opportunities, and leadership development programs. We're driven by our values: Drive, Innovation, Respect, and Agility. Give back through community initiatives and volunteer opportunities, and build a life you love.

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