Principal Customer Reliability Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Principal Customer Reliability Engineer, you will serve as the primary technical liaison between Accela's cloud platform and our customers, ensuring reliable, secure, and predictable outcomes across production environments. You will partner closely with Site Reliability Engineering, Product, Support, Professional Services, and Engineering teams to guide customers through SaaS migrations, troubleshoot complex technical challenges, and improve operational performance.

This role combines deep technical expertise with customer engagement and strategic influence. You will help customers successfully adopt and operate Accela's platform while driving continuous improvements in reliability, observability, incident response, and service delivery. Your focus is on reducing customer impact, improving operational resilience, and building long-term confidence in the platform.

SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES

• Serve as the customer-facing technical representative for Accela's SaaS Operations organization, partnering with Engineering, SRE, Database Engineering, Product, Professional Services, and Support teams to ensure customer success.
• Lead technical engagements related to SaaS implementations, migrations, and ongoing production operations, ensuring reliable and predictable outcomes for customers.
• Partner with Professional Services and Support teams to identify technical requirements, define migration strategies, and facilitate successful transitions into steady-state operations.
• Develop and improve operational processes, tooling, monitoring, metrics, and alerting capabilities that support customer onboarding, migrations, and ongoing platform reliability.
• Act as a senior escalation point for complex customer issues, leveraging observability tools, application performance monitoring, log analysis, distributed tracing, and metrics to diagnose and resolve production concerns.
• Lead cross-functional response efforts for critical customer-impacting incidents and implementation challenges, coordinating stakeholders to drive timely resolution.
• Partner with customers to establish reliability expectations, communicate service-level commitments, and provide guidance regarding operational risk and change management practices.
• Collaborate with Sales, Professional Services, and Support teams to communicate Accela's service management processes, cloud operations practices, and compliance posture, including SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and PCI-DSS requirements.
• Provide customer-driven insights and feedback to Product, Engineering, and SRE teams to improve platform reliability, usability, and operational effectiveness.
• Support pre-sales and customer expansion activities by providing technical expertise related to reliability, architecture, cloud operations, and compliance.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and best-practice guidance to Customer Reliability Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, and other technical teams.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 8+ years of experience in Production Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Operations, Technical Support Engineering, or related SaaS environments, including customer-facing or escalation leadership responsibilities.
• Strong customer focus and demonstrated ability to communicate effectively with both technical and business stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience operating and supporting SaaS platforms on Microsoft Azure.
• Experience with Kubernetes and modern containerized environments.
• Strong experience using observability and monitoring tools, including APM platforms, distributed tracing, logging, and metrics solutions.
• Deep troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis expertise across application, infrastructure, networking, operating system, and database layers.
• Working knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code concepts and tools, particularly Terraform.
• Experience developing automation and operational tooling using Python, PowerShell, Bash, or similar scripting languages.
• Demonstrated ability to lead Incident, Problem, and Change Management processes during high-severity customer escalations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting technical information to customer leadership and executive stakeholders.
• Experience using Git and GitHub-based workflows.

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience leading SaaS migrations, cloud transformations, or large-scale customer onboarding initiatives.
• Experience supporting SaaS platforms operating under SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, or PCI-DSS compliance frameworks.
• Prior software development or systems engineering experience.
• Experience supporting database, infrastructure, or datacenter migration projects.
• Experience supporting pre-sales activities, technical account management, or customer enablement programs.
• Experience conducting production readiness reviews, reliability assessments, or operational risk evaluations.
• Experience leveraging AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or other LLM-based solutions to improve diagnostics, automation, and customer communications.
• Strong Linux systems administration experience alongside Microsoft Windows expertise.

Travel

• Up to 10% travel for customer engagements, executive meetings, industry conferences, and strategic business activities.

ABOUT ACCELA
For nearly 20 years, Accela has been an industry leader in designing and delivering government software to improve efficiency, increase citizen engagement and enable the development of thriving communities. Today, citizens are savvy to how services should be delivered, and expect a consistently convenient, openly transparent view into their local government. While government agencies struggle to do more with less, our mission has never been more critical. Accela provides a robust, cloud-based platform of government software solutions that accelerate growth, efficiency, and transparency in communities of all sizes. From planning, to building, to service request management and more, Accela’s SaaS offerings level the playing field for small and medium governments and enable smaller agencies to leverage larger city technologies. Our open and flexible technology helps agencies address specific needs today, while ensuring they are well prepared for the emerging challenges of the future.

OUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
Accela believes in developing and nurturing a workplace community where our differences are celebrated, and everyone feels a sense of psychological safety and belonging. Accela is committed to putting resources and attention towards evolving our practices, policies, and philosophies to enable diversity to thrive and to support equity in opportunity for everyone.

COMPENSATION AND WELL-BEING
The annual base salary range for this full-time position is $160,000-$190,000 (less applicable taxes). The actual annual base salary offered may be adjusted based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, location, education, skills, training, and experience. In addition to an annual base salary, this position is eligible for an annual bonus target. This is a discretionary bonus awarded based on company and individual goal achievement.
 
Accela’s U.S. team members will receive a generous benefits package consisting of options including flexible time off, comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, family planning benefits, 401(k) retirement savings plan with company match, health savings account with company contributions, flexible spending account, life, accident, and disability coverage, business travel insurance, employee assistance programs, and other well-being benefits.

Accela is an Equal Opportunity Employer/Affirmative Action Employer and will respond to requests for job accommodations.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, national origin, protected veteran status, or based on disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation

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