Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Salary: £80,000 - 80,000 per year

• Experience leading, supporting and developing engineers, including line management or strong mentoring experience.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly and build effective relationships with a range of stakeholders.
• Experience working with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, applying modern Dev Ops and SRE practices.
• Experience designing and delivering infrastructure-as-code solutions using tools such as Terraform, Cloud Formation or similar.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable and well-tested code in at least one programming language.
• Experience designing, operating and improving distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user impact.
• This role requires SC clearance, and we require candidates to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years.

• Lead and support a team of Site Reliability Engineers, setting clear direction while fostering an inclusive, collaborative and high-performing team culture.
• Build strong working relationships with product, delivery and architecture colleagues to ensure platform services meet business and user needs.
• Provide technical leadership across Dev Ops and SRE practices, guiding teams to adopt approaches that support reliability, sustainability and continuous improvement.
• Coach, mentor and support engineers across DDaT, contributing to a supportive and diverse engineering community.
• Design, build and maintain reliable, secure and scalable cloud-based infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches.
• Enable teams to develop effective observability practices, including monitoring, logging, metrics and alerting that support proactive service management.
• Work with teams to define and embed Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives and error budgets in a pragmatic and user-focused way.
• Support the development and continual improvement of CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, frequent and low-risk delivery of changes.
• Oversee live service reliability, supporting teams through incident and problem management while encouraging a learning-focused, blameless culture.
• Ensure security, resilience and compliance considerations are understood and embedded into engineering practices.

• AWS
• Azure
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Dev Ops
• Embedded
• Support
• Security
• Terraform
• dbt

We are the Department for Business and Trade, a mission-driven organisation working to grow the economy by helping businesses invest, grow and export, creating jobs and opportunities across the UK. Our Digital, Data and Technology directorate develops and operates the tools and services that support this mission. This is a permanent Grade 7 Senior SRE Squad Lead role based in London, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham or Salford, with hybrid working, flexible working patterns and a salary of £63,824 to £80,158 depending on location and technical skills assessed  offer a flexible working culture, a Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%, annual leave starting at 25 days rising to 30 days, three paid volunteering days each year, learning and development tailored to the role, access to professional qualifications, certifications and technical training, and wider Civil Service benefits including cycle-to-work.

Our team is investing in observability, service-level management, platform automation, developer experience and cloud engineering, and we value collaboration, continuous learning and the freedom to explore new ideas while making a tangible impact on services used across government.

last updated 27 week of 2026