Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Genomics England; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 96,000 - 118,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous Leave

Pension & Financial benefits

Learning budgets

Recognition & Rewards

Flexible/Blended working

Job summary

Genomics England is seeking a hands-on Principal Site Reliability Engineer to establish and grow an organisation-wide SRE capability. You will build and lead a small team, define standards, and partner with product squads to embed reliability across services.

Key responsibilities include guiding architecture decisions for resilience, improving operations, and driving toil-reduction initiatives while working across AWS, on-prem, and hybrid environments.

Qualifications

• Comprehensive knowledge of SRE principles and practices.
• Excellent release automation skills (Python preferred).
• Strong understanding of architecture and resilience.
• Extensive experience in CI/CD, IaC, monitoring and recovery.
• Experience in at least one public cloud (AWS preferred).
• Proven capability to lead teams and coordinate work.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a small SRE team (initially 3 people).
• Identify high-value reliability improvements across platforms.
• Define standards, tooling and patterns for reliable services.
• Develop capabilities to reduce toil and improve engineering effectiveness.
• Partner with product and engineering to embed SRE principles.
• Influence engineering strategy, governance and direction across the org.
• Foster a culture of reliability and operational resilience.

Skills

SRE principles

Python development

Release automation

CI/CD

Platform engineering

Cloud experience

Team leadership

Communication

Tools

Terraform

GitLab

Artifactory

DataDog

Kubernetes

ECS/Fargate

On-premise systems

Job description

Genomics England is a global leader in enabling genomic medicine and research, focused on creating a world where everyone benefits from genomic healthcare. Building on the 100,000 Genomes Project, we support the NHS’s world-first national whole genome sequencing service and run the growing National Genomic Research Library, alongside delivering numerous major genomics initiatives. By connecting research and clinical care at national scale, we enable immediate healthcare benefits and advances for the future.

Our mission is to provide the evidence and digital systems so that by 2035 genomics could play a role in up to half of all healthcare interactions, whilst securing the UK’s position as the best place to discover, prove and benefit from genomic innovations.

We are accelerating our impact and working with patients, doctors, scientists, government and industry to improve genomic testing, and help researchers access the health data and technology they need to make new medical discoveries and create more effective, targeted medicines for everybody.

Behind the Healthcare and Research outcomes, Genomics England delivers through designing, developing and operating complex healthcare software systems.

We're on the cusp of big changes with the real prospect of genomics becoming the fabric of everyday healthcare through the lifetime - from birth to old age.

Job Description

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

As Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will help establish and grow Genomics England's organisation-wide SRE capability.

You will be responsible for:

• Building and leading a small team of Site Reliability Engineers (initially 3 people)
• Identifying the highest-value opportunities to improve reliability across our platforms
• Defining standards, patterns and tooling that help engineering teams to build and operate reliable services
• Developing services and capabilities that reduce operational toil and improve engineering effectiveness
• Partnering with product and engineering teams to embed SRE principles into their ways of working
• Influencing engineering strategy, governance and technical direction across the organisation
• Helping to build a culture of reliability, continuous improvement and operational resilience

The SRE team will work alongside product squads, helping them adopt reliability practices, improve operations and solve complex technical challenges, rather than operating services on their behalf.

In your first year you will establish the initial SRE team, identify the highest-priority reliability challenges across Genomics England, and define the standards, services and practices that will underpin our long-term approach to reliability.

The Principal SRE reports to the Director of Engineering within the Technology and Product Directorate.

About the Tech Stack

The new SRE team will support squads that run a variety of services: most of these are either user-facing web applications (React), backend APIs (Python), bioinformatics pipelines (NextFlow), or data ETL workflows (Prefect, Dremio). These services increasingly run in AWS, though there is still a significant on-premise presence, and they run in a mixture of compute environments, from ECS/Fargate to HPC clusters to (occasionally) Kubernetes.

Within the SDLC we have a standard toolchain which includes Terraform for infrastructure-as-code, GitLab for source code and CI/CD, Artifactory for software artefacts, and DataDog for observability.

We are working to become interoperable with the wider NHS via open standards like FHIR and GA4GH APIs and increasingly aiming to integrate with their own API Management platform.

About You

You are a hands-on engineering leader with deep experience of SRE and platform engineering. You combine strategic thinking with the ability to identify and prioritise the areas where reliability improvements will have the greatest impact.

You are a problem-solver who identifies risks, issues, gaps, and dependencies and brings people together to find solutions. You do this through your supportive, empathetic and collaborative behaviours, acting as a coach, mentor, guide or constructive questioner as the situation demands.

You are a great communicator, comfortable not just leading your own team, but also engaging across the engineering community and with non-technical stakeholders.

Essential Skills and Experience

While we recognise the value of relevant qualifications or certifications, we are primarily interested in your real-world experience:

• Comprehensive knowledge of SRE principles and practices with significant experience of applying these to real-world situations
• Excellent software engineering skills especially in the context of release automation and other toil‑eliminating activities (Python preferred, polyglot ideal)
• Strong understanding of how architecture and other factors contribute to the overall resilience of systems
• Extensive experience of platform engineering across CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, operational monitoring and alerting, backup and recovery etc.
• Experience in at least one major public cloud (AWS preferred but not essential)
• Demonstrable ability to lead teams, develop people and coordinate work towards shared outcomes
• Strong interpersonal skills with a temperament that builds trust and connection within and across squads through open, honest communication
• Comfortable engaging responsively with teams both remotely and in person when required
• Ability to navigate rapidly to effective solutions through engaged and inclusive listening, clarity of thought, clear documentation, and succinct presentation

These skills are not essential but if you have either of them, they may prove to be useful:

• Background in healthcare or bioinformatics
• Experience in regulated environments

If you’re an experienced Site Reliability Engineer leader, who thrives on working collaboratively to mature engineering practices, we’d love to hear from you. Join us at Genomics England and make a meaningful impact in the world of genomics.

Additional Information

Salary From: £107,000

Closing Date: Monday 12th October @ 23:00 (UK time)

Being an integral part of such a meaningful mission is extremely rewarding in itself, but in order to support our people, we’re continually improving our benefits package. We pride ourselves on investing in our people and supporting them to achieve their career goals, as well as offering a benefits package including:

• Generous Leave: 30 days’ holiday, plus bank holidays, plus additional leave for long service, and also the option to apply for up to 30 days of remote working abroad annually (approval required).
• Family-Friendly: Blended working arrangements, flexible working, enhanced maternity, paternity and shared parental leave benefits.
• Pension & Financial: Defined contribution pension (Genomics England double‑matches up to 10%, however you can contribute more if you wish), Life Assurance (3x salary), an Electric Vehicle salary sacrifice scheme and a Give As You Earn scheme.
• Learning & Development: Individual learning budgets, support for training and certifications, and reimbursement for one annual professional subscription (approval required).
• Recognition & Rewards: Employee recognition programme and referral scheme.
• Health & Wellbeing: Subsidised gym membership, a free Headspace account, and access to an Employee Assistance Programme, eye tests, flu jabs.

Equal opportunities and our commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace

Genomics England is actively committed to providing and supporting an inclusive environment that promotes equity, diversity and inclusion best practice both within our community and in any other area where we have influence. We are proud of our diverse community where everyone can come to work and feel welcomed and treated with respect regardless of any disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, or social background.

Genomics England’s policies of non‑discrimination and equity and will be applied fairly to all people, regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, being pregnant or recently becoming a parent, race, religion or beliefs, sex or sexual orientation, length of service, whether full or part‑time or employed under a permanent or a fixed‑term contract or any other relevant factor.

Genomics England does not tolerate any form of discrimination, harassment, victimisation or bullying at work. Such behaviour undermines our mission and core values and diminishes the dignity, respect and integrity of all parties. Our People policies outline our commitment to inclusivity.

We aim to remove barriers in our recruitment processes and to be flexible with our interview processes. Should you require any adjustments that may help you to fully participate in the recruitment process, we encourage you to discuss this with us.

Culture

We have four key behaviours that represent what we would like Genomics England to feel like and the culture we want to encourage, in order for us to achieve our mission. These behaviours help us all work well together, deliver on our outcomes, celebrate our successes and share feedback with each other. You can read about these and other aspects of our culture here:

Culture | Genomics England

Blended working model

Genomics England operates a blended working model as we know our people appreciate the flexibility that hybrid working can bring. We expect most people to come into the office a minimum of 2 times each month. However, this will vary according to role and will be agreed with your team leader. There is no expectation that people will return to the office full time unless they want to, however, some of our roles require full time on site attendance e.g., lab teams, reception team.

Our teams and squads have, and will continue to reflect on what works best for them to work together successfully and have the freedom to design working patterns to suit, beyond the minimum. Our office locations are: Canary Wharf, Cambridge and Leeds.

Onboarding background checks

As part of our recruitment process, all successful candidates are subject to a Standard Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. We therefore require applicants to disclose any previous offences at point of application, as some unspent convictions may mean we are unable to proceed with your application due to the nature of our work in healthcare.