Forward-Deployed SRE | UK DV Clearance

Cavendish Professionals; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Cavendish Professionals seeks a hands-on Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer / SRE to build, operate, and maintain high-performance production systems in a secure environment.

The role requires active UK DV clearance and is hybrid with 3 days on-site near London. 4+ years in SRE/DevOps, Docker/Kubernetes, and a CS/CE degree are preferred for this challenging, autonomous position.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, DevOps, or a similar engineering discipline.
• Demonstrable experience building and deploying production systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes, ideally in production containerised environments.
• A degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering from a top-50 university.
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, high-autonomy environment.
• Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation, approximately every 5–6 weeks.
• Active UK DV clearance is required.
• Ability to work from, or relocate within approximately 30 minutes of, the secure London site.

Responsibilities

• Build, operate, and maintain high-performance, scalable, and reliable services supporting the client’s platforms across UK government deployments.
• Take ownership of production infrastructure reliability, including monitoring, alerting, configuration management, upgrades, and capacity planning.
• Work closely with forward-deployed and product teams to design sensible, scalable systems and share responsibility for diagnosing, resolving, and preventing production issues.
• Deploy new client products across production environments and perform migrations to the latest infrastructure technologies.
• Lead automation initiatives that reduce manual operational work and improve reliability, developing innovative solutions using the client’s Foundry and Apollo platforms, including advanced LLM and AI technologies.
• Debug, improve, and optimise services and infrastructure with a focus on long-term reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Identify recurring operational problems and develop automated, sustainable solutions rather than relying on manual intervention.
• Contribute to architecture and systems-design decisions, balancing reliability, scalability, security, and operational simplicity.
• Participate in an on-call rotation approximately every 5–6 weeks, providing technical troubleshooting and incident response support for production systems.

Skills

SRE experience

Docker

Kubernetes

On-call rotation

UK DV clearance

High autonomy

Education

CS/CE degree (top-50 university)

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

Cavendish Professionals seeks a hands-on Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer / SRE to build, operate, and maintain high-performance production systems in a secure environment.

The role requires active UK DV clearance and is hybrid with 3 days on-site near London. 4+ years in SRE/DevOps, Docker/Kubernetes, and a CS/CE degree are preferred for this challenging, autonomous position.