Principal SRE: Lead Reliability & Platform Engineering

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 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.