Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Spectrum IT; Southampton; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Spectrum IT is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join its Azure-focused Cloud Platform Engineering team in Southampton on a hybrid basis. The role focuses on observability, reliability, security and scalable cloud platforms, with leadership across operations and engineering teams.

The ideal candidate has extensive Azure and Kubernetes experience, strong automation skills, and a track record of delivering reliable production systems in regulated or critical environments.

Qualifications

• Six years plus of commercial Site Reliability Engineering or equivalent cloud platform experience.
• Hands-on in Microsoft Azure and production Kubernetes (AKS).
• Strong observability with monitoring and dashboards.
• Experience with IaC tools like Terraform or Bicep.

Responsibilities

• Protect and improve production environments as part of the SRE team.
• Prioritise a backlog of reliability, scalability and ops improvements.
• Lead outages investigations and root-cause analyses.
• Develop automation to replace repetitive tasks.
• Define SLIs/SLAs and error budgets; monitor cloud spend.
• Collaborate with Cloud Operations, Support, DevOps and Engineering.
• Design monitoring and dashboards for cloud platforms and microservices.
• Implement observability with Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry.

Skills

Azure

Kubernetes

Observability

IaC

PowerShell

Python

CI/CD

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

Azure Monitor

OpenTelemetry

Terraform

Bicep

AKS

Job description

Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Azure Cloud Platform

Southampton - Hybrid

My client provides advanced SaaS solutions to organisations operating within the public safety and justice sectors. Its technology supports multimedia evidence management and emergency contact centre operations for customers around the world.

Due to continued growth, my client is expanding its Cloud Platform Engineering function and is looking for an experienced Senior Site Reliability Engineer.

This is a highly hands-on position focused on ensuring that business-critical cloud platforms remain observable, measurable, secure, scalable and reliable. The successful candidate will combine strong Azure engineering expertise with platform automation, observability and operational leadership.

Candidates are likely to come from a Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Cloud Engineering, Platform Engineering or Cloud Development background.

Security requirement: Applicants must have lived in the UK continuously for the past five years and be eligible to obtain NPPV3 and UK Security Clearance.

Role Responsibilities

• Work as part of the Site Reliability Engineering team responsible for protecting and improving production environments.
• Manage and prioritise a technical backlog of reliability, scalability and operational improvements.
• Lead investigations into service outages, performance degradation, platform reliability and cloud expenditure.
• Conduct detailed root-cause analysis and ensure corrective actions are implemented.
• Identify repetitive operational activities and replace them with sustainable automation.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to Cloud Operations, Support, DevOps and Engineering teams.
• Establish and maintain service level objectives, service level agreements, service level indicators and error budgets.
• Design and implement monitoring, alerting and dashboarding across cloud platforms and microservices.
• Deploy and configure observability technologies including Grafana, Prometheus, Azure Monitor and OpenTelemetry.
• Develop custom application and platform metrics to improve operational visibility.
• Create advanced queries, dashboards and alerts for distributed microservices.
• Develop reusable Bicep or Terraform modules for monitoring and cloud infrastructure.
• Support and improve production Kubernetes environments, particularly Azure Kubernetes Service.
• Review and optimise platform performance, availability, security and cost.
• Contribute to cloud architecture, technical scoping and the implementation of scalable platform solutions.
• Support continuous improvement across deployment, provisioning and operational processes.
• Help ensure platforms and working practices meet relevant security, governance and compliance requirements.
• Explore opportunities to use AI-assisted tools to improve automation, troubleshooting and engineering productivity.

Essential Skills and Experience

• At least six years' commercial experience within Site Reliability Engineering or a closely related cloud platform role.
• Demonstrable experience supporting business-critical cloud platforms and live production services.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of Microsoft Azure.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and containerised workloads, ideally using AKS.
• Extensive experience in platform engineering, cloud provisioning and observability.
• Strong monitoring, alerting and dashboarding experience using technologies such as:
• Azure Monitor, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch
• Experience creating custom metrics, queries, dashboards and alerts for microservices.
• Advanced scripting or software development skills using PowerShell, Python, C# or a comparable language.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code experience using Bicep, ARM or Terraform.
• Experience using Git or another version-control platform.
• Good knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server, Elasticsearch and structured data formats including YAML, JSON and XML.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, cloud platforms and containerisation.
• Experience defining or working with SLOs, SLAs, SLIs and error budgets.
• Excellent troubleshooting and root-cause analysis skills.
• Experience designing scalable, secure and maintainable cloud solutions.
• Strong understanding of cybersecurity principles, governance and compliance.
• Experience operating across both transformation projects and live-service environments.

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Azure DevOps pipeline experience covering CI/CD and automated deployment.
• Experience developing reusable infrastructure and monitoring modules.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled engineering and automation tools.
• Knowledge of security and compliance frameworks such as:
• ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus, FedRAMP
• Experience providing technical leadership across multidisciplinary cloud, engineering and support teams.
• A background in regulated, public-sector or security-sensitive environments.