Senior Manager AI Reliability Operations

About Our Team

Lenovo is building Quantum, a nextgeneration hybrid AI platform that spans Windows, Android, and cloud. As part of this initiative, we are expanding the Qira organization - Lenovo's crossdevice Personal AI that works seamlessly across Lenovo and Motorola products.

We are seeking a Senior Manager, AI Reliability Operations to lead the operational backbone that keeps Qira safe, stable, performant, and continuously improving. This leader will own our Operations pillar within the Qira SRE organization, responsible for oncall excellence, incident response, AI change safety, deployment reliability, and production governance across device, edge, and cloud environments.

This is a highimpact leadership role shaping how Qira operates at global scale.

Location: Open to remote work in the US. The preferred work location is Chicago, IL.

What You'll Do

As the Senior Manager for AI Reliability Operations, you will:

Operational Leadership

• Lead and scale the Operations pillar within Qira SRE, including oncall/NOC, incident management, deployments, and operational readiness.

• Drive operational excellence for Qira's hybrid AI systems across ondevice, edge, and cloud environments.

• Establish a worldclass followthesun oncall model, ensuring rapid detection, response, and recovery from incidents.

Incident & Crisis Management

• Own incident response, including command, coordination, communications, and postincident analysis.

• Create a culture of blameless postmortems and continuous learning.

• Build automation, runbooks, and tooling that dramatically reduce MTTR and operational toil.

AI Deployment & Change Safety

• Own the AI change management lifecycle for model, prompt, retriever, index, and policy updates.

• Implement safe rollout mechanisms including shadow testing, canarying, evaluation gates, and automated rollback policies.

• Ensure every production change meets reliability, safety, and auditability standards.

Operational Governance

• Own operational frameworks including:

• Runbook requirements

• Change controls & ITSM

• Incident taxonomies

• Operational readiness reviews

• Reliability signoff for launches

• Partner with Security, Compliance, and Product Safety on runtime policy enforcement and operational safeguards.

CrossFunctional Partnership

• Partner with AI/ML, Platform, Firmware, DevOps, and Product teams to ensure reliability and operational criteria are built into every release.

• Collaborate closely with Observability, Service Reliability Engineering, and AI Reliability pillars in a unified reliability mission.

• Advocate for and help prioritize operational improvements across the engineering ecosystem.

Team & Talent Leadership

• Hire, mentor, and grow a highperforming global team of SREs, DevOps engineers, and incident specialists.

• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and operational craftsmanship.

• Define career paths and leadership opportunities for reliability operations staff.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, DevOps, or largescale operations, including 3+ years leading teams.

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.

• Experience running missioncritical oncall operations for distributed systems.

• Deep knowledge of incident management, crisis response, and postmortem practices.

• Handson experience with CI/CD pipelines, deployments, and change management.

• Experience operating systems in cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Strong understanding of Linux systems, networking, and distributed system fundamentals.

• Excellent leadership, communication, and crossfunctional alignment skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting AI/ML platforms, inference systems, or dataintensive workloads.

• Familiarity with model/prompt/index rollout practices, canary systems, and evaluation gating.

• Strong background in observability, alerting quality, and signal engineering.

• Expertise with operational governance frameworks (SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, runbook automation).

• Experience with hybrid architectures combining device, edge, and cloud.

• Passion for operational excellence at massive scale and building hightrust engineering culture.

Why This Role Matters

Qira is a firstofitskind hybrid AI system. Its reliability is inseparable from its intelligence.
This role ensures that Qira remains:

• stable,

• safe,

• predictable,

• resilient, and

• continuously improving

- across millions of devices and global cloud infrastructure.

You will lead the team that ensures Qira "just works," every time.

The base salary budgeted range for this position is $190K - $230K. Individuals may also be considered for bonus and/or commission.