Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SC Cleared)

Job Title: Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SC Cleared)

Location: Remote

Contract Length: 6 months (with scope to extend)

Start Date: November 2026

IR35: Inside

Interview Process: 1 Stage, MS Teams

Clearance Required: SC (active, unelapsed clearance required)

We are supporting a government client in hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join its SRE team, driving the adoption of SRE best practice across a large cloud estate.

Using both soft skills and technical experience, the successful candidates will work with application teams to ensure the client's standards and governance are met when onboarding services into the cloud, through a dedicated assessment stage gate process, ensuring applications satisfy the operational and security needs of running in production. Working with development teams from the design phase, they will help apply good practice and standards to application infrastructure, supporting reliable and secure solutions for the public.

This is a senior role that leads by example, providing technical direction and supporting other SREs within the team. It suits an engineer who can influence and coach development teams as well as respond hands-on to major incidents. Participation in an out-of-hours on-call rota is a requirement.

Key Responsibilities

• Drive adoption of SRE best practice across the cloud estate, including onboarding services through an assessment stage gate process
• Design and develop techniques for improving application reliability, runbooks, knowledge transfer across teams and ongoing SRE strategy within professional communities
• Work collaboratively with development teams from the design phase, providing guidance on best practice and ensuring application monitoring is enabled
• Push a mindset change within the organisation to foster engineering ownership, SRE best practice and the importance of the integrity and maintenance of the live service
• Manage the error budget agreed with the product owner for the application, balancing work in alignment with it
• Act as the focal point for the investigation and resolution of major or complex incidents, ensuring people with the right skills are proactively available to respond
• Conduct reviews for all high priority and major incidents, ensuring they are completed quickly and published
• Assess the impact of change requests in consultation with stakeholders, providing technical expertise and authorising the implementation of subsequent changes
• Coach and mentor application development and operations engineers in the practice and techniques of SRE
• Help reduce toil and increase automation, improving reliability and reducing time to live and spend on repetitive tasks
• Routinely seek views and capture ideas from stakeholders and team members, encouraging collaboration and innovation
• Provide on-call support to help restore services, and participate in an out-of-hours on-call rota

Essential Skills

• Strong Site Reliability Engineering experience, driving the adoption of SRE best practice (reliability, observability, automation and operational ownership) across a cloud estate
• Experience leading the investigation and resolution of major or complex incidents, including running post-incident reviews and publishing the outcomes quickly
• Experience managing error budgets agreed with product owners, balancing reliability and delivery work accordingly
• Experience working with development teams from the design phase to apply good practice, standards and governance to application infrastructure, including onboarding services to production through assessment or stage gate processes
• Experience implementing monitoring and observability for applications, and producing runbooks and knowledge-transfer material
• Experience assessing the impact of change requests in consultation with stakeholders and providing the technical expertise to authorise changes
• Experience reducing toil and increasing automation to cut repetitive work and time to live
• Experience coaching and mentoring development and operations engineers in SRE practice
• Strong communication and stakeholder skills, with the ability to influence engineering culture and foster engineering ownership
• Ability to provide on-call support and take part in an out-of-hours on-call rota