Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Defence

Overview

We are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to play a key role in strengthening IBM's reliability engineering and Dev Ops capabilities across public‑sector and defence programmes. In this role, you will lead smaller delivery projects, mentor junior engineers, and help define the technical direction for our SRE and Dev Ops practices. You will work across the full service lifecycle, focusing on automation, reliability, observability, and secure delivery.

This position offers the opportunity to contribute to the stability and resilience of mission‑critical systems used by UK government and defence organisations. Working within IBM's multidisciplinary delivery teams, you will apply disciplined engineering methods, high‑assurance security approaches, and modern SRE practices to ensure that the systems we support are dependable, scalable, and compliant with public‑sector standards.

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and efficient cloud‑based systems and applications for public‑sector and defence environments.
• Provide expert‑level guidance on SRE and Dev Ops tools, technologies, and best practices across IBM delivery teams.
• Work directly with government and defence clients to understand their operational needs, translating them into reliable technical solutions.
• Stay up to date with emerging SRE and Dev Ops trends to ensure IBM continues to deliver modern, efficient, and secure engineering solutions.
• Use infrastructure‑as‑code tools such as Terraform or Cloud Formation to automate and standardise infrastructure deployments.
• Configure and maintain monitoring and alerting platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Nagios to ensure strong system observability and reliability.
• Manage log aggregation and analysis tools such as the ELK Stack or Splunk, supporting visibility and auditability in secure environments.
• Apply robust security best practices throughout the engineering lifecycle, aligned with Dev Ops principles and the stringent requirements of government and defence systems.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate software delivery and improve deployment speed, quality, and consistency.

• Strong design analytical & problem‑solving skills & attention to detail
• Excellent communication & collaboration skills
• Experience with cloud platforms containerization & CI/CD pipelines
• Strong understanding of system design scalability & reliability
• Ability to work independently & with a team

• Experience with CI/CD tools, such as Jenkins, Git Lab CI/CD, or Circle
  
  CI, with the ability to design and optimise automated build and deployment pipelines.
• Familiarity with configuration management tools, including Ansible, Puppet, or Chef, for managing consistent and repeatable infrastructure.
• Strong knowledge of infrastructure‑as‑code tools, such as Terraform or Cloud Formation, for provisioning and managing cloud resources.
• Experience using monitoring and logging platforms like Prometheus, ELK Stack, or Datadog to support observability, alerting, and troubleshooting.
• A genuine passion for continuous learning, staying current with SRE and Dev Ops practices, and ongoing professional development.

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect
• AWS Certified Dev Ops Engineer

At IBM CIC, we deliver deep technical and industry expertise to a wide range of public and private sector clients in the UK. Your ability to accelerate impact and make meaningful change for your clients is enabled by our strategic partner ecosystem and our robust technology platforms across the IBM portfolio. Curiosity and a constant quest for knowledge serve as the foundation to success here.

You'll be encouraged to challenge the norm, investigate ideas outside of your role, and come up with creative solutions which impact a wide network of clients, whom may be at their site or one of our CIC or IBM locations. Our culture of evolution centres on long‑term career growth and development opportunities in an environment that embraces your unique skills and experience.

• Many training opportunities from classroom to e‑learning,…