Principal SRE & Platform Lead

SmartRecruiters, Inc.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 91,000 - 123,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous leave 30 days + holidays

Pension & Life Assurance

Learning & development budget

Headspace subscription

Job summary

Genomics England is seeking a hands-on Principal Site Reliability Engineer to establish and grow an organisation-wide SRE capability. You will lead a small team, identify reliability priorities, and set standards across the tech stack including AWS and on‑premise systems.

The role requires strategic thinking, collaboration with product and engineering, and a passion for operational resilience. London/Hybrid/onsite at multiple locations within the UK.

Qualifications

• Comprehensive knowledge of SRE principles and practices with significant experience applying them
• Excellent software engineering skills, especially in release automation and toil-eliminating activities (Python preferred)
• Strong understanding of how architecture factors contribute to resilience
• Extensive experience of platform engineering across CI/CD, IaC, monitoring and alerting, backup and recovery
• Experience in at least one major public cloud (AWS preferred)
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams, develop people and coordinate work toward shared outcomes
• Strong interpersonal skills to build trust across squads and stakeholders
• Comfortable engaging remotely and in person when required
• Ability to drive effective solutions through listening, clarity of thought, documentation, and presentation

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a small SRE team (initially 3 people)
• Identify high-value reliability improvements across platforms
• Define standards, patterns and tooling for reliable services
• Develop services to reduce toil and increase engineering effectiveness
• Embed SRE principles with product and engineering teams
• Influence engineering strategy, governance and technical direction
• Foster culture of reliability and operational resilience
• Collaborate with squads to adopt reliability practices and solve complex challenges
• Year1: establish initial SRE team and standards underpinning long-term reliability

Skills

SRE principles

Python

Platform engineering

CI/CD

Infrastructure as code

Cloud platforms

Leadership

Communication

Tools

Terraform

GitLab

DataDog

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Genomics England is seeking a hands-on Principal Site Reliability Engineer to establish and grow an organisation-wide SRE capability. You will lead a small team, identify reliability priorities, and set standards across the tech stack including AWS and on‑premise systems.

The role requires strategic thinking, collaboration with product and engineering, and a passion for operational resilience. London/Hybrid/onsite at multiple locations within the UK.