Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Location: Wokingham (2 days/week onsite)
Type: Inside IR35
Rate: Up to £70.00 per hour (DOE)

We're looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to lead efforts in maintaining the reliability, performance, and scalability of mission-critical platforms and services. This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of software engineering, infrastructure, automation, and incident response.

You'll be instrumental in defining and implementing the standards and systems that keep applications running smoothly across cloud and hybrid environments—including OpenShift clusters.

What You'll Be Responsible For

As a Senior SRE, you will:

• Ensure high availability, performance, and latency of critical systems across Azure, AWS, and OpenShift.
• Design and implement robust observability systems (logging, monitoring, alerting) to detect and resolve issues proactively.
• Lead and evolve incident management processes—runbooks, comms, postmortems, and root cause analysis.
• Define and monitor SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets to balance innovation with stability.
• Automate manual processes through infrastructure-as-code, scripting, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Mentor engineering teams on best practices for deployment, reliability, scalability, and incident preparedness.
• Support and scale OpenShift-based containerized applications, including upgrade strategies, patching, and workload optimization.

Core Responsibilities

Operations & Incident Management

• Act as the senior escalation point for outages and critical incidents.
• Lead post-incident reviews and implement long-term remediation plans.
• Communicate platform health and risk posture to stakeholders at all levels.

Engineering & Automation

• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines using tools like Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and GitLab.
• Design scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure with IaC tools (Terraform, Bicep).
• Create internal tools and automation to accelerate development and reduce operational toil.

Strategic & Advisory

• Architect cloud and container infrastructure, with a focus on OpenShift, Kubernetes, and hybrid deployments.
• Collaborate with engineering, architecture, and security teams to embed reliability into the SDLC.
• Promote advanced deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling updates) and rollback readiness.
• Drive a culture of reliability, observability, and operational excellence across engineering teams.

Technical Environment

Hands-on experience with many of the following is expected:

• Cloud & Containers: Azure, AWS, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Docker, App Services, IaaS (EC2, VMs)
• CI/CD & Automation: Terraform, Bicep, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, Splunk, Application Insights, CloudWatch
• Languages & Scripting: Python, C#, Bash, PowerShell
• Networking: DNS, SSL/TLS, load balancing, WAF, proxies, CDN, Azure App Gateway
• Databases: MSSQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, CosmosDB, DynamoDB
• OS & Systems: Windows, Linux, Nginx, IIS

Ideal Candidate Profile

• 5+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or production engineering roles.
• Expertise operating in high-availability, fast-paced production environments.
• Solid engineering foundation with experience reading and writing production code.
• Hands-on experience deploying, supporting, and scaling OpenShift environments.
• Proven track record of leading incident responses and improving system reliability.
• Strong collaboration and mentoring abilities across infrastructure, development, and security teams.

What You'll Bring

• Ability to balance operational risk with engineering velocity.
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• A passion for automating everything and eliminating manual work.
• A mindset of ownership, continuous improvement, and technical leadership.

Ready to make reliability your legacy?

If you're a senior SRE with OpenShift experience and a drive to solve complex operational challenges, we'd love to hear from you.