Site Reliability Engineer; SRE - Defence

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) - Defence / National Security - £75k - Farnborough - Hybrid

A permanent opportunity for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer who enjoys building secure, automated, and highly reliable platforms. This role sits within a defence and national security environment, working on modern infrastructure where automation, resilience, and secure-by-design principles are fundamental.

You'll work closely with platform engineers, infrastructure teams, and operational stakeholders to take requirements from early design and proof-of-concept through to production. The role blends hands-on engineering with technical design, offering real influence over tooling, standards, and Dev Ops ways of working. It suits someone curious, detail-oriented, and comfortable working in complex, regulated environments.

What you'll be doing

Designing, delivering, upgrading, and maintaining core platforms, services, and automations
Building and improving monitoring, alerting, and observability platforms
Designing secure infrastructure using automation-first approaches
Creating and product ionising proofs of concept for new tools and technologies
Diagnosing and resolving performance, reliability, and availability issues
Supporting architecture, documentation, and non-functional requirements
Mentoring engineers and helping improve Dev Ops and SRE practices

Essential experience

Strong experience with Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows Server environments
Hands-on scripting skills (Bash, Python, Power Shell or similar)
Proven experience with automation and Dev Ops tooling (Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD, Git)
Experience working with Azure or similar cloud platforms
Solid understanding of infrastructure reliability, monitoring, and incident response
Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work across multiple priorities
Willingness to work in secure, regulated environments (SC eligibility required)
Desirable experience

Infrastructure-as-Code lifecycle and best practices
Containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
Configuration management and desired state tooling
Application and platform monitoring tools (Splunk, Nagios or similar)
Experience hardening systems and conducting security assessments
Understanding of Agile and Dev Ops principles in practice

A collaborative, inclusive culture with strong benefits including competitive pay, bonus, pension, private healthcare, generous leave, professional development, wellbeing perks, and modern on-site facilities