Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Job summary

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) helps businesses invest, innovate, export and grow across the UK. The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate helps to deliver this by designing, building and running the services, platforms and technology that businesses and colleagues rely on every day.

Our teams work on a wide range of services and technologies, including:

• digital services that help businesses access government support, guidance and opportunities

• data and AI products that support decision making and enable innovation

• internal tools and services that help colleagues work more effectively

• secure technology and platforms that support critical government services

• cyber security services that protect systems, data and users

By joining DDaT, you'll work on services used by businesses, colleagues and citizens across the UK. You'll be part of multidisciplinary teams focused on improving services, solving complex problems and delivering better outcomes for users.

We are committed to creating an inclusive and supportive workplace. In recognition of this, we were named Best Public Sector Employer at the Women in Tech Employer Awards 2025!

As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you will lead a team of Site Reliability Engineers while providing technical leadership across the design, delivery and continuous improvement of reliable, scalable and secure services that underpin critical BIST digital products.

You’ll work across modern cloud technologies and collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to improve how we build and operate services. From observability and monitoring through to CI/CD, infrastructure as code and service-level objectives, you’ll help teams build resilient services and make informed decisions about reliability, performance and operational risk.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role alongside responsibility for developing and supporting your team. You’ll help shape our approach to Site Reliability Engineering, improve reliability and reduce operational burden, while creating an environment where engineers can learn, develop and do their best work

You’ll work closely with product managers, architects, delivery colleagues and engineers across DDaT, helping to shape platform strategy and influence good engineering practices. You’ll also help build and scale our global platform, support live services through an on-call rota and lead improvements that enhance service quality and delivery outcomes.

In BIST this role is known as Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Lead

Job description

You will:

• Lead and develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers, providing technical direction, coaching and support.

• Provide technical leadership across SRE and DevOps, helping teams build reliable, scalable and sustainable services.

• Design, build and maintain cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches.

• Lead the adoption of effective observability, including monitoring, logging, metrics and alerting.

• Help teams define and use SLIs, SLOs and error budgets to make informed decisions about reliability and delivery.

• Improve CI/CD and engineering automation to enable safe, frequent and low-risk change.

• Oversee live-service reliability and support effective incident and problem management, promoting a learning-focused and blameless culture.

• Work with product, delivery and architecture colleagues to ensure platform services meet user and business needs.

• Coach and mentor engineers and contribute to the wider DDaT engineering community.

• Ensure security, resilience and compliance are embedded into engineering practices.

Person specification

It is essential that you have:

• Experience leading, supporting and developing engineers, providing technical direction through line management, coaching or mentoring (LEAD)

• Strong experience applying modern SRE, DevOps or platform engineering practices within cloud environments such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud (LEAD)

• Experience designing, operating and improving reliable and scalable distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user impact.

• Experience designing and delivering infrastructure-as-code and automation solutions, using technologies such as Terraform, CloudFormation or equivalent.
• Strong communication and stakeholder skills, with the ability to influence engineering practices, explain complex technical concepts clearly and build effective relationships.

It is desirable that you have:

• Experience writing clean, maintainable and well-tested code in at least one programming language such as Python

• Experience defining and using SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and observability practices to improve service reliability

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Leadership

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Programming and Build (software engineering)
• Modern Standards Approach
• Availability and Capacity Management
• Development Process Optimisations
• Information Security
• User Focus

Benefits

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

How to apply

As part of the application process you will be asked to upload a two-page CV and complete a 750-word personal statement outlining how you meet the