Lead Site Reliability Engineer - Edinburgh

Inspire People; City of Edinburgh; Hybrid; GBP 72,000 - 88,000; Full time

Job summary

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) is hiring a Grade 7 engineer in Edinburgh with hybrid working. You will lead and mentor a team of Site Reliability Engineers, shaping reliable cloud-based services and observability across platforms.

This role requires SC clearance and presence in the UK for the last 3 of 5 years. You will collaborate with product and architecture teams to deliver resilient infrastructure and secure, scalable systems.

Qualifications

• Experience leading and mentoring engineers, including line management.
• Strong communication and stakeholder relationship skills.
• Experience with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud and DevOps/SRE practices.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Ability to write clean, maintainable code in at least one language
• Experience designing distributed systems with focus on reliability and performance
• Must have UK SC clearance
• Eligible to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years

Responsibilities

• Lead and support a team of Site Reliability Engineers, setting clear direction and a high-performing culture.
• Build strong relationships with product, delivery and architecture teams.
• Provide technical leadership across DevOps and SRE practices.
• Coach and mentor engineers across DDaT, fostering an inclusive community.
• Design, build and maintain cloud-based infrastructure using IaC.
• Enable observability with monitoring, logging, metrics and alerts.
• Define and embed SLIs/SLOs and error budgets pragmatically.
• Support CI/CD pipelines for safe, frequent deployments.
• Oversee live service reliability and incident management, with blameless culture.
• Embed security, resilience and compliance into engineering practices

Skills

Engineering leadership

Communication

Distributed systems design

SRE / DevOps practices

Security mindset

UK working eligibility

Tools

AWS

Azure

Google Cloud

Terraform

CloudFormation

CI/CD

dbt

Job description

Salary: £80,000 - 80,000 per year

Requirements

• 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.
• This role requires SC clearance.
• We require candidates to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years.

Responsibilities

• 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 and 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.

Technologies

• AWS
• Azure
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• DevOps
• Embedded
• Support
• Security
• Terraform
• dbt

More

We are the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST), working to grow the economy by helping businesses invest, innovate, export and grow across the UK. Our Digital, Data and Technology directorate develops and operates the tools and services that support this mission. This permanent Grade 7 role is based in London, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham or Salford, with hybrid working, flexible working patterns and a salary of £63,824 to £80,158 depending on location (London £67,547 to £83,778) and technical skills assessed at interview. We offer flexible hybrid working, typically 2-3 days per week in the office, full-time, part-time and flexible working options, a Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%, annual leave starting at 25 days rising to 30 days with service, three paid volunteering days each year, tailored learning and development, access to professional qualifications, certifications and technical training, an inclusive culture that encourages learning, collaboration and continuous improvement, and employee benefits including cycle-to-work and wider Civil Service benefits. We are investing in observability, service-level management, platform automation, developer experience and cloud engineering, and this role offers the chance to combine technical leadership with hands‑on engineering while helping shape reliable digital services across government.

last updated 36 week of 2026