Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Eden Scott; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 135,000; Full time

Job summary

Eden Scott partners with a global payments organisation to appoint a Principal Site Reliability Engineer. This role leads reliability engineering across a large multi-cloud environment, shaping platform engineering, automation and AI-driven engineering practices.

You will collaborate with software engineers, platform teams and leadership to improve service reliability, reduce toil and embed best practices. This is a genuine SRE role with emphasis on ownership and proactive resiliency.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Site Reliability Engineer or similar across large-scale, multi-cloud environments.
• Strong background in reliability engineering principles and platform engineering.
• Experience defining SLIs/SLOs and error budgets.
• Automation-first mindset with IaC and IaC tooling familiarity.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (Python/Go/Java/C#).
• Experience with observability platforms and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Define and implement SLIs, SLOs and error budgets for services.
• Build observability frameworks with modern monitoring and telemetry tooling.
• Apply Four Golden Signals methodology to critical services.
• Diagnose reliability issues across apps, infra, networks and cloud environments.
• Lead incident response activities and post-incident reviews.
• Design resilience, DR and chaos engineering practices.
• Automate toil away to improve efficiency.
• Create tooling to eliminate recurring operational issues.
• Set reliability standards and influence engineering direction.

Skills

SRE

Platform engineering

Observability

Automation

Python

Go

DevOps

Incident management

Tools

Datadog

New Relic

Splunk

OpenTelemetry

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

We are partnering with a global payments organisation undergoing a significant transformation in the way it builds, operates and scales its engineering platforms.

This is not a traditional infrastructure or DevOps environment. The business is investing heavily in platform engineering, automation and AI, with a long-term vision of creating an internal developer platform that provides a cloud-like, self-service experience for engineering teams.

As part of this journey, they are looking to appoint a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to help shape reliability engineering practices across a large-scale, multi-cloud environment.

The Opportunity

This role sits at the heart of a growing Platform Engineering function responsible for building and operating the platforms that software engineers use every day. Reliability is treated as an engineering discipline rather than an operational function.

You will work closely with software engineers, platform teams, network engineers, security specialists and leadership to improve service reliability, reduce operational toil and embed best practice across the business.

This is a genuine SRE role rather than a rebranded DevOps position. You'll be expected to influence engineering teams, coach developers on reliability practices, define service-level objectives and drive a culture of ownership across the organisation.

The successful candidate will help deliver a vision centred on:

• Developer ownership and autonomy
• Reliability as a software engineering problem
• Automation-first operational practices

What You'll Be Doing

• Defining and implementing SLIs, SLOs and error budgets
• Building observability frameworks using modern monitoring and telemetry tooling
• Applying the Four Golden Signals methodology across critical services
• Diagnosing reliability issues across applications, infrastructure, networks and cloud environments
• Leading incident response activities and post-incident reviews
• Designing resilience, disaster recovery and chaos engineering practices
• Working with engineering teams to remove toil through automation
• Creating tooling and capabilities that eliminate recurring operational issues
• Setting reliability standards and influencing engineering direction across the wider organisation
• Coaching development teams on reliability engineering best practices

What We are Looking For

We are interested in engineers who combine strong software engineering expertise with a deep understanding of reliability and platform engineering.

You'll likely bring experience in:

• Site Reliability Engineering
• Infrastructure Automation
• DevOps with strong software development capability

Key technical experience includes:

• Strong programming skills in Python, Go, Java, C# or similar
• Observability, monitoring and telemetry platforms
• SLI/SLO implementation and error budget management
• Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform and Ansible
• Public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP or OCI)
• Linux, networking and distributed systems
• CI/CD and modern software delivery practices
• Incident management and root cause analysis

Experience with technologies such as Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, Catchpoint or similar observability platforms would be highly beneficial.

AI & The Future of Engineering

One area that truly differentiates this opportunity is the organisation's commitment to AI-enabled engineering.

They are looking for engineers who are already embracing AI as part of their day-to-day workflow and who understand that modern platform engineering is rapidly evolving beyond traditional automation.

You will ideally have exposure to:

• Agentic AI workflows
• Advanced prompting techniques
• MCP Servers and integrations
• Context management and prompt engineering
• Multi-agent and sub-agent orchestration
• AI-driven operational tooling

You don't need to be an AI expert, but you should be excited by where the industry is heading and keen to be at the forefront of that journey.

Why Join?

• Fully remote working
• Genuine platform engineering transformation programme
• Opportunity to influence engineering practices at scale
• Significant investment in automation, reliability and AI
• Modern multi-cloud environment spanning AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI
• Strong engineering leadership team driving meaningful change
• High-profile role with substantial technical influence

Other information

• On-call rota currently around 1-in-4, expected to improve with further team growth