Manager, System Reliability

At NorthWinds Technology, we are a technology organization that offers a leading solution in the dental insurance industry, working with our Delta Dental insurance partners.  This modern, cloud-based technology platform is growing quickly with over 10 million lives under contract.  This is an exciting opportunity to join our leadership team at NorthWinds Technology in the role of Manager, System Reliability.  In this Manager role, you will have the opportunity to lead the execution of our system reliability functions within the organization. This role oversees a System Reliability team, supporting a high-functioning team of technical leaders and individual contributors.

Reporting to our Director of System Reliability, this role will be expected to:

• Provide leadership and management to the System Reliability team to achieve the mission, vision, and strategies of NorthWinds, through leadership of a technical team focused on various support aspects of our platform and solutions, which include insurance operations and data solutions.
• Championing a culture of automation, observability, resilience, and continuous improvement.
• Foster a culture of root cause ownership and learning, where teams go beyond symptom resolution to identify underlying systemic issues and implement long-term, preventative solutions.
• Establish and continuously evolve operational frameworks, incident response processes, and system reliability metrics.
• Lead high‑impact initiatives to improve system availability, performance, and scalability.
• Mentor and coach engineers, fostering an inclusive, high‑performance environment.
• Guide resource planning, team structure, and capability building across the various teams.
• Accountable for people management across this team (career conversations, performance management, compensation management, roles & responsibilities, staffing levels, talent development/training, succession planning).
• Work with business and technology stakeholders to understand business needs and execute plans for reduction of backlog or other customer needs.
• Leading through high-severity incidents and outages
• Manages expenses and explores new opportunities to reduce operating costs and expand, grow, and transform activities 
• On-Call responsibilities as part of a rotation within System Reliability

NorthWinds is a stable company with the financial backing of three major Delta Dental companies. Our employees like it here, and we know that because our turnover is low and engagement is high. The latest HR analysis on our benefits summarized below show NorthWinds in the 85-90th percentile for our overall Total Rewards package. 

• Health, vision, dental and life insurance
• Short- and Long-term disability insurance paid entirely by NorthWinds
• Health Savings, Flexible Spending and Dependent Care Accounts
• Competitive base salary
• Short Term Incentive compensation/bonus opportunity
• 401(k) with 100% Employer match for the first 6% of income contributed (pre-tax or Roth)
• Profit sharing with discretionary contribution based on successful prior year results of NorthWinds (pre-tax)

We encourage owning your work life balance with a rich PTO allotment that includes accrued time, floating holidays, company holidays and time off for volunteering/community work. 

With a strong benefits package and the opportunity to be a key member of our technology leadership group, you'll shape the long‑term system reliability roadmap, strengthen operational excellence, and drive the engineering practices that ensure our systems are secure, stable, scalable, and repeatable. The ideal candidate is a strategic, people‑centered leader who can unify multiple teams under a shared vision while empowering the team to operate with confidence, autonomy, and accountability. This is a rare opportunity to shape a unified system reliability strategy, guide exceptional technical leaders, and elevate the performance of a large engineering organization. If you’re driven by impact and inspired by complex challenges, we encourage you to apply.