SRE Squad Lead

DSIT • Full-time • United Kingdom • £63.82k - £83.78k / year • 3d ago

Job summary

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission - to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways.

Firstly, we help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.

Secondly, we open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains. This can be through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.

Finally, we work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advance, finance and deal-making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission.

About the role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer Manager, you will lead the design, delivery and continuous improvement of reliable, scalable and secure platform services that underpin critical DBT digital products. Working closely with multidisciplinary, agile teams, you’ll ensure development teams have the tools and support they need from observability and monitoring through to CI/CD pipelines, so services are resilient, performant and centred around user needs. You’ll champion good engineering practices, helping teams adopt service-level thinking using metrics, service-level indicators (SLIs), objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to support informed, collaborative decision making.

This is a people-focused leadership role where you will create an environment in which engineers can do their best work. You will line manage and develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers, supporting their growth and wellbeing, while also acting as a senior technical leader across the wider DDaT community. You’ll work in partnership with product managers, architects and delivery colleagues to shape platform strategy, improve reliability and reduce operational burden. Alongside hands-on engineering, you will help build and scale our global platform, support live services through an on-call rota, and lead improvements such as enhancing observability and streamlining deployment processes to improve service quality and delivery outcomes.

Job description

You will:

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 DevOps/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 (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs) 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.

What tech will you be using?

AWS and Azure
GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipelines/CodeBuild
Terraform
Docker, Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
ElasticSearch/OpenSearch
Python and Django framework
PostgreSQL as a service (Amazon RDS)
Datadog, Logstash
Redis/Elasticache

Person specification

It is essential that you have:

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 of working with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, applying modern DevOps and SRE practices.
Experience designing and delivering infrastructure-as-code solutions using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation 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.