Senior SRE Engineer

We are seeking a talented and experienced SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Senior Software Engineer to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in SRE practices, cloud infrastructure management, and automation. If you have a consistent track record of architecting and building large-scale systems, enjoy solving intriguing system challenges at internet-scale, are innovative at heart, and have a great balance of skills in learning, organising, building, and making an impact, this role might be a great fit for you!

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Design and Infrastructure:

• Contribute to postmortem culture by facilitating comprehensive, blameless post-incident reviews that identify root causes, contributing factors, and actionable remediation items.
• Track incident trends to identify systemic issues and prioritise reliability improvements.
• Implement chaos engineering practices to proactively identify failure modes, validate system resilience, and build confidence in recovery procedures.
• Conduct game days and disaster recovery exercises.

SRE Process and Principles Implementation:

• Deploy and evolve SRE practices across the organisation by establishing core SRE principles, frameworks, and methodologies.
• Define and implement service reliability practices, including Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budgets, to balance innovation velocity with system reliability.
• Manage Error Budgets as a mechanism for making data-driven decisions about feature velocity vs. reliability.
• Track, report, and enforce error budget policies, facilitating conversations between engineering and product teams about risk tolerance and release decisions.

Reliability Engineering and Infrastructure:

• Reduce toil through automation by identifying repetitive operational work and systematically eliminating it through infrastructure-as-code, automation frameworks, and intelligent tooling.
• Measure and track toil reduction efforts, aiming to keep toil below 50% of team time.
• Implement capacity planning processes that ensure systems have adequate headroom to meet SLOs during peak traffic, unexpected load spikes, and degraded states.
• Develop predictive models and automated scaling mechanisms.

Observability, Monitoring and Reporting:

• Build comprehensive observability systems that provide deep visibility into service health, performance, and user experience. Implement monitoring strategies based on the Four Golden Signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) and USE/RED methodologies.
• Create SRE dashboards and reporting mechanisms that provide real-time visibility into SLO compliance, error budget consumption, and system reliability metrics. Develop executive-level reporting on reliability trends, incident impact, and improvement initiatives.
• Establish alerting strategies that are actionable, symptom-based, and aligned with SLOs.
• Reduce alert fatigue by tuning thresholds and eliminating noise while ensuring critical issues trigger appropriate responses.

Collaboration and Leadership:

• Partner with development teams to implement reliability from the design phase using SRE principles.
• Conduct design reviews focused on failure modes, scalability, observability, and operational concerns.
• Guide teams in building services that meet SLO requirements.
• Collaborate through code reviews and design reviews, ensuring infrastructure-as-code, automation scripts, and reliability improvements follow best practices, are well-documented, and maintain high-quality standards.
• Manage project priorities using error budgets as a decision-making framework.
• Leverage agile methodologies while ensuring reliability work gets appropriate prioritisation alongside feature development.

Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement:

• Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks through detailed analysis of metrics, traces, and profiles.
• Optimise system resources, tune configurations, and implement auto-scaling to ensure SLO compliance during varying load conditions.
• Drive continuous improvement through SRE feedback loops by analysing SLO violations, incident trends, and toil metrics to identify systemic improvements. Champion the reliability roadmap and advocate for technical debt reduction.
• Maintain a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing by creating comprehensive runbooks, operational guides, system architecture documentation, and disaster recovery procedures.
• Ensure operational knowledge is distributed across the team.
• Track and report on SRE metrics, including SLO compliance rates, error budget consumption, mean time to detection (MTTD), mean time to resolution (MTTR), toil percentage, and reliability improvement velocity.

On-call and reliability:

• Participate in a 12x7 on-call rotation and be available to work with global teams in the event of critical outages.

Requirements:

• Preferably 8+ years of experience in DevOps/SRE roles, with demonstrated expertise in implementing SRE principles, SLO/SLI frameworks, and error budget policies in production environments.
• Deep experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent, including experience building custom dashboards, alerts, and SLO-based monitoring.
• Strong background in incident management, including experience as an Incident Commander, conducting blameless postmortems, and implementing systematic reliability improvements based on incident learnings.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and reliability engineering, including failure modes, fault tolerance patterns, circuit breakers, bulkheads, rate limiting, and graceful degradation strategies.
• Experience with a number of the following: Kubernetes, Docker, Service Mesh such as Istio, Envoy, Linkerd, Solo & ECS.
• Experience in cloud-focused software development, preferably in Go, Python, or other object-oriented programming languages.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation.
• Experience with CI/CD automation, including GitLab pipelines and other related tools.
• Strong hands-on experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure.
• Proven track record of implementing scalable, high-performance infrastructure solutions in fast-paced, dynamic environments.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical project stakeholders, with the ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment.
• Self-driven and detail-oriented with the ability to understand complex distributed systems and identify reliability risks proactively.
• Certifications in relevant technologies, such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, or Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), are preferred.
• BS Degree in Computer Science or Equivalent.