Head of SRE Engineering

Civica; Australia; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Work

Volunteer days

Career development

Job summary

Civica is seeking a Head of SRE Engineering to transform APAC LiveOps into a modern SRE/CloudOps function. You’ll drive reliability, incident response, and observability across the region, collaborating with global leadership to shape the operating model and engineering foundations.

You will lead with technical credibility and strong people leadership, guiding teams across Product, Platform, Security, and Support to improve uptime and resilience.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership across SRE/CloudOps in a complex tech environment.
• Strong SaaS/cloud experience with high-availability systems.
• Experience guiding technical and cultural transformation toward proactive reliability.
• Credible with senior engineers; can steer reliability and scalability.
• Solid incident management, observability, uptime, and automation.
• Knowledge of IaC and production ownership in distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead transformation of APAC LiveOps into modern SRE/CloudOps.
• Define operating model, foundations, and proactive reliability practices.
• Collaborate with Product/Platform/Security and regional leadership.
• Shape incident response, observability, and downtime reduction.
• Coach teams, hire talent, and drive accountability through change.

Skills

SRE leadership

CloudOps

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability

Incident management

Automation

Infrastructure as Code

Production ownership

Tools

New Relic

Datadog

Grafana

Terraform

CI/CD tooling

Job description

We’re Civica and we make software that helps deliver critical services for citizens all around the world. From local to state government, to education, to health and care, over 5,000 public bodies across the globe use our software to help provide critical services to over 100 million citizens.

Our aspiration is to be a GovTech champion everywhere we work around the globe, supporting the needs of citizens and those that serve them every day. Building on 21 years of continuous growth and success, we're at a pivotal point on our journey to realise that aspiration.

As a company, we’re passionate about what we do and the citizens we help to serve. If you too would like to help champion the use of technology in public services, to improve outcomes for citizens and public sector organisations, then Civica is the right place for you. We will help you unlock the best version of yourself, achieve growth in your career whilst making a real difference to people and communities.

Why you will love this opportunity as a Head of SRE Engineering at Civica

This is a rare opportunity to lead the transformation of Civica’s APAC LiveOps function into a modern SRE and CloudOps capability. The role exists to create greater consistency in how Civica supports production services, responds to incidents, measures user experience, and improves reliability across the region.

You will lead through a pivotal period of change, working closely with global LiveOps leadership across APAC, the UK, Europe and North America. You will help shape the operating model, build the right engineering foundations, and move the function from reactive operations towards a more proactive, automated and reliability-led way of working.

This role will have a clear mission: keeping citizen-facing services reliable, recoverable, secure and continuously improving, so customers can trust Civica’s software every day. You will influence how teams detect, respond to, recover from and prevent production issues, while helping build a culture where systems become more stable and resilient.

You will bring technical credibility, strong people leadership and practical transformation experience. You will work across Product Engineering, Platform Engineering, Security, Support and regional leadership teams to strengthen operational readiness, reduce downtime, improve observability and embed SRE practices across APAC.

What you will need to be successful in this role

• Proven leadership experience across SRE, CloudOps, infrastructure, platform engineering or production operations in a complex technology environment.
• Strong SaaS, cloud infrastructure or hosted software experience, with a deep understanding of high-availability production services.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical and cultural transformation, ideally shifting teams from traditional operations to modern SRE or CloudOps practices.
• Strong technical credibility, with the ability to engage senior engineers, challenge technical direction and guide teams on reliability, scalability and operational excellence.
• Solid understanding of incident management, observability, uptime, resilience, automation, infrastructure as code and production ownership.
• Working knowledge of modern engineering practices and tooling, including Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD, monitoring, alerting and observability platforms such as New Relic, Datadog or Grafana.
• Strong people leadership capability, with experience building trust, coaching teams, hiring high-calibre talent and driving accountability through change.
• Ability to partner effectively across Product Engineering, Platform Engineering, Security, Support and regional/global leadership teams.
• Commercial and customer awareness, with a clear understanding of how reliability, downtime and incident response impact customer experience and business outcomes.
• Flexibility to work across regions and time zones, supporting collaboration with global teams where required.

Why you'll love working with us.

We know that when our people are happy, they will work better and have greater work satisfaction. Here's what you can expect:

We're all different -

and we love this about us.

We provide an inclusive,safe, and welcoming environment to all Civicans

there are heaps of opportunities to enable you to grow and be your best.

Giving culture -

we encourage you to "give back" with benefits such as our Days of Difference leave where you can volunteer for a charity of your choice.

Flexible Work -

we have the technology and tools to support you to work from home and come into our offices now and then to catch up and socialise with colleagues.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. In fact, we strongly believe that diversity of experience contributes to a broader collective perspective that will consistently lead to a better company and better outcomes. We are working hard to increase the diversity of our team wherever we can, and we actively encourage everyone to consider becoming a part of it. We are especially keen to receive applications from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia.