Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Want your engineering skills to enable real scientific breakthroughs? We’re looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our highly skilled IT Operations team at EMBL-EBI.

At EMBL-EBI, our IT & Technical Services department underpins groundbreaking research that improves human and planetary health. As part of our small but highly skilled IT Operations team, you’ll play a critical role in ensuring the availability, reliability and efficiency of services that support researchers across the globe.

In this hands‑on role, you’ll ensure the reliability, performance, and availability of the services that thousands of scientists rely on worldwide. You’ll tackle complex infrastructure challenges, improve automation and resilience, and help shape the future of our platform.

If you want variety, genuine ownership, and the opportunity to support research that improves human and planetary health, this is a role where your work truly matters.

In this role, you will support the team in the delivery of some or all of the following services:

• Identity & Access Management – Maintain, improve and standardise our authentication and authorisation infrastructure (Active Directory, Entra-, Red Hat IDP).
• Email Systems – Support and develop our mail services (Postfix, Cyrus, Roundcube, Mailman), including a planned migration to O365.
• Transfer services – Support the systems we use for data transfer (Globus, Aspera, FTP, HTTP).
• File Replication (FIRE) Archive – Develop and maintain our software‑defined object storage.
• Monitoring & Reliability – Maintain and evolve distributed  monitoring while contributing to the development of a long‑term monitoring strategy.
• Automation & Orchestration – Work with Gerrit, Foreman, RPM repositories, and Puppet to deploy, update and manage 3,000+ servers.
• Core Infrastructure – Maintain and improve Puppet modules (NTP, SSSD) and support new Red Hat OS templates.
• Knowledge Sharing – Produce documentation and Standard Operating Procedures that empower our Service Desk and improve user experience.

• 5+ years of experience with Linux production systems
• Experience with orchestration/automation (Foreman/Puppet).
• Strong troubleshooting ability (tcpdump, strace, log parsing at scale).
• Experience with directory services (389 DS or OpenLDAP).
• Ability to review and guide code in Python, Bash and Puppet.

Don’t be dissuaded from applying if you do not have all the right technologies in your portfolio - training will be provided to a candidate with the right experience and attitude.

Hybrid Working:
At EMBL-EBI, we are pleased to offer hybrid working options for all our employees, with an expectation that you will be on site at least two days a week, one of which will be a “team day”.

Interviews:
We plan to hold all interviews with selected candidates remotely via Zoom.

Contract length: 3 years (renewable up to 9 years)

Salary :
Grade 6 – monthly salary from £3,861.91 after tax plus benefits and financial allowances based on family circumstances. Excl. personal pension and insurance contributions.

Do something meaningful
At EMBL-EBI you can apply your talent and passion to accelerate science and tackle some of humankind’s greatest challenges. EMBL-EBI, part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, is a worldwide leader in the storage, analysis and dissemination of large biological datasets. We provide the global research community with access to publicly available databases and tools which are crucial for the advancement of healthcare, food security, and biodiversity.

Join a culture of innovation
We are located on the Wellcome Genome Campus, alongside other prominent research and biotech organisations, and surrounded by beautiful Cambridgeshire countryside. This is a highly collaborative and inclusive community where our employees enjoy a relaxed atmosphere. We are committed to ensuring our employees feel valued, supported and empowered to reach their professional potential. Watch this video to see how EMBL-EBI makes an impact.

• Financial incentives: Monthly family, child and non-resident allowances, annual salary review, pension…