AVP, Reliability Engineer - OnePay

Role Summary/Purpose

The AVP, Reliability Engineer – OnePay plays a pivotal technical role within Synchrony Financial to ensure high availability, stability, security, and performance of applications supporting OnePay integrations. In order to provide operational excellence in a highly regulated environment, this role provides technical expertise and rigor to identify and remediate failures or looming issues that could negatively impact customer and partner experiences or prevent adherence to SLAs. The ideal candidate excels at problem analysis, troubleshooting methods, and situational awareness within the context of distributed systems.

This is a hands-on technologist role requiring exposure to SRE and DevOps technology stacks and strong understanding of application support processes, including monitoring and addressing incidents/alerts across engineering applications and ensuring effective coordination and handoffs with vendors, partners, and internal Synchrony teams. The role also develops automation and leverages AIOps approaches to detect gaps, monitor trends, reduce operational toil, and expedite response and remediation.

Essential Responsibilities

• Drive investigations with cross-functional teams to understand failures, analyze production defects, troubleshoot systems, identify root cause, and implement fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Ensure the dependability, availability, and scalability of OnePay-integrated applications and services by partnering with application, platform, and infrastructure teams.
• Enhance observability, including establishing and maintaining dashboards and monitoring capabilities (e.g., Splunk, New Relic, and similar tools), improving alert quality, and strengthening operational readiness.
• Design and implement monitoring, alerting, and metrics to track and report adherence to service SLAs/SLOs, performance, and operational efficiency.
• Develop automation and leverage AIOps to detect reliability gaps, monitor trends, reduce noise, and expedite incident response and restoration activities.
• Continuously monitor the health and performance of engineering applications, production servers, and key service indicators; provide monitoring/reporting and recommendations as needed.
• Support release and operational processes, including troubleshooting CI/CD pipeline issues (e.g., Jenkins pipelines) and coordinating releases with partner teams.
• Participate in Agile sprints with cross-functional teams involving multiple technologies, personnel, and processes; contribute reliability requirements and improvements that support continuous delivery.
• Support a root cause analysis discipline and continuous improvement practices that reduce downtime and increase resiliency.
• Coordinate effectively with vendor partner teams and Synchrony teams to ensure seamless support handoffs and timely issue resolution.
• Communicate the status of technical stacks, incidents, risks, and reliability initiatives to stakeholders and leadership, including partner-facing stakeholders as appropriate.
• Work closely with an experienced staff comprising both Synchrony resources and third-party contractors.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to respond to critical production issues.
• Perform other duties and/or special projects as assigned.

Qualifications/Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in application development, reliability engineering, systems engineering, and/or production application support (or equivalent practical experience) OR in lieu of a Degree, High School Diploma/GED and a minimum of 8+ years of experience of relevant experience.
• Demonstrated experience troubleshooting and supporting distributed systems in cloud environments.
• Good understanding of the nature of distributed systems and cloud providers.
• Solid understanding of cloud concepts such as containerization, message queues, load balancing, data replication, and high availability patterns.
• Understanding of IT application support processes, including incident management, problem resolution, and operational/support metrics used for decision-making.
• Knowledgeable in UNIX Operating System fundamentals.
• Familiar with network programming concepts and protocols.
• Proficiency in DevOps concepts and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, including automation, monitoring, and reliability best practices.
• Hands-on experience with scripting/automation in at least one language such as Python, Bash, JavaScript, PowerShell, Go, or similar.
• Familiar with one or more configuration automation/tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.
• Strong communication skills (verbal and written) and excellent interpersonal skills with ability to interact with multiple audiences, including clients/partners, developers, managers, and senior executives.
• Customer-focus mindset; self-driven, detail-oriented; strong organizational and time management skills; ability to operate with limited supervision.
• Well-developed analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Continuously seeks opportunities to enhance products/services through process improvements.

Desired Characteristics

• Strong alignment to DevOps tools and SRE best practices; demonstrated ability to reduce operational toil through automation.
• Experience with cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and/or GCP; exposure to deployment processes such as AWS/PCF where applicable.
• Familiar with toolsets such as Jira, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Kibana, Grafana, Splunk, and application performance monitoring tools such as New Relic.
• Experience supporting or coordinating CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins/CloudBees) and release processes.
• Knowledge of an application or systems language such as Java, Golang, Rust, or C++.
• ITIL Foundation and/or SRE/DevOps certifications are a plus.
• Experience driving reliability improvements through resiliency patterns, performance tuning, and operational readiness practices in partner-integrated environments.

Grade/Level: 10

The salary range for this position is 100,000.00 - 170,000.00 USD Annual and is eligible for an annual bonus based on individual and company performance.

Actual compensation offered within the posted salary range will be based upon work experience, skill level or knowledge.

Salaries are adjusted according to market in CA, NY Metro and Seattle.

Our Way Of Working

We’re proud to offer you flexibility. At Synchrony, our way of working allows you to have the option to work from home near one of our Hubs or come into one of our offices. You will be required to commute to your nearest Hub (either virtual or physical) for in-person engagement activities such as regular business or team meetings, training and culture events.

Field Sales and some Commercial team roles may have varied location requirements based upon partner obligations or preferences.

Eligibility Requirements

• You must be 18 years or older
• You must have a high school diploma or equivalent
• You must be willing to take a drug test, submit to a background investigation and submit fingerprints as part of the onboarding process
• You must be able to satisfy the requirements of Section 19 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act.
• New hires (Level 4-7) must have 9 months of continuous service with the company before they are eligible to post on other roles. Once this new hire time in position requirement is met, the associate will have a minimum 6 months’ time in position before they can post for future non-exempt roles. Employees, level 8 or greater, must have at least 18 months’ time in position before they can post. All internal employees must consistently meet performance expectations and have approval from your manager to post (or the approval of your manager and HR if you don’t meet the time in position or performance expectations).
• Legal authorization to work in the U.S. is required. We will not sponsor individuals for employment visas, now or in the future, for this job opening. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

Our Commitment

When you join us, you’ll be part of an inclusive culture where your individual skills, experience, and voice are not only heard – but valued. Together, we’re building a future where we can all belong, connect, and turn ideals into action. More than 50% of our workforce is engaged in our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), where community and passion intersect to offer a safe space to learn and grow.

This starts when you choose to apply for a role at Synchrony. We ensure all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status. We’re proud to have an award-winning culture for all.

Reasonable Accommodation Notice

Federal law requires employers to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or to perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include making a change to the application process or work procedures, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.If you need special accommodations, please call our Career Support Line so that we can discuss your specific situation. We can be reached at 1-866-301-5627. Representatives are available from 8am – 5pm Monday to Friday, Central Standard Time

Job Family Group

Information Technology

Key skills/competency

• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• DevOps
• Cloud Environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Distributed Systems
• Automation (Python, Bash, Go)
• Monitoring (Splunk, New Relic)
• CI/CD Pipelines (Jenkins)
• Incident Management
• Root Cause Analysis
• Troubleshooting