Principal Site Reliability Engineering Expert Director

What You’ll Do

The Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is a senior technical leader responsible for shaping how reliability, automation, and operational excellence are engineered across the organisation. Operating across domains including traditional infrastructure, cloud engineering, network operations, identity, observability, security, AI-driven operations, and automated data workflows, the role focuses on designing scalable systems, reusable engineering patterns, and standardised controls that reduce operational toil, improve resilience, and embed reliability, governance, and compliance directly into delivery pipelines and operational platforms.

This role will drive organisational change towards automation-first, measurable, and repeatable practices. A key part of the role is building and evolving reusable CI/CD and Terraform modules, engineering guardrails, observability patterns, and automation frameworks that can be adopted across multiple teams and domains without requiring each team to solve the same problems independently.

The Principal SRE also plays an important enablement role beyond deeply technical teams, helping less technical areas of the business adopt structured, governed, and scalable ways of working. This includes translating complex engineering practices into practical standards, improving how governance is implemented through engineering controls rather than manual oversight, and driving operational maturity across a broad and diverse technology landscape.

The ideal candidate is a systems thinker who understands how services, networks, identity, data flows, and operational processes fail in real-world conditions, and can apply that understanding to build automation-first, reliability-focused operating models that scale across both technical and non-technical functions.

• Design and evolve reliability patterns across cloud, network, identity, and security domains.
• Identify systemic risks and failure modes across platforms and services, and define engineering solutions to mitigate them.
• Ensure operational activities are embedded into delivery models through automation, CI/CD integration, and event-driven workflows.

• Lead the design of automation frameworks that eliminate manual operational tasks across multiple domains.
• Translate incident learnings and operational inefficiencies into scalable automation and preventative controls.
• Drive adoption of automation-first principles, reducing dependency on human-driven processes.
• Contribute to AI-driven operational use cases, including event correlation, anomaly detection, noise reduction, operational insights, and automated remediation.
• Ensure AIOps capabilities are grounded in reliable telemetry, clear control boundaries, and measurable operational outcomes.

• Define standards for telemetry, monitoring, alerting, and operational visibility across all critical systems.
• Ensure services are observable, measurable, and support proactive detection of issues.
• Improve operational readiness, incident response effectiveness, and time-to-recovery through engineering solutions.

• Contribute to the design of CI/CD patterns that embed reliability, security, and operational controls into pipelines.
• Ensure infrastructure, network, identity, and security configurations are managed through code and validated automatically.
• Support integration of platform services into delivery pipelines to enable consistent, repeatable deployments.

• Contribute to secure-by-design patterns, including least privilege, identity-based access, and short-lived credentials.
• Support integration of security controls (e.g. secrets management, authentication, policy enforcement) into engineering workflows.
• Ensure security and compliance requirements are met through engineering controls rather than manual processes.

• Support the design of resilient network architectures and segmentation aligned with Zero Trust principles.
• Ensure network configurations and controls are automated, validated, and observable.
• Contribute to infrastructure design patterns that improve availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.
• Design and improve operational patterns for network reliability, segmentation, visibility, and change validation.
• Support automation and standardisation of network controls and operational procedures to reduce manual intervention and configuration drift.

• Provide technical leadership across teams, influencing standards, architecture, and engineering practices.
• Mentor engineers on reliability engineering, automation, and systems thinking.
• Drive consistency through reusable patterns, frameworks, and documentation.

• Contribute to reliability engineering strategy and roadmap across the organisation.
• Communicate…