Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Thought Machine; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Employee share package

Job summary

Thought Machine seeks a highly capable software engineer to join our London-based Engineering Hub. You’ll help build fault-tolerant, scalable SaaS vault products, participate in design reviews, and own parts of disaster recovery and deployment automation.

We value individuals who can drive projects to completion, work with Kubernetes, Python or Go, and collaborate across global teams while enhancing observability and cloud infrastructure on AWS or GCP.

Qualifications

• Must have track record delivering high-impact projects with long-term scalability.
• Strong understanding of hosting and networking design patterns.
• Experience driving product development with minimal handholding.

Responsibilities

• Support product engineering to build fault-tolerant, scalable applications.
• Contribute to disaster recovery, backup, redundancy and capacity planning discussions.
• Participate in global on-call rotation to fix bottlenecks in SaaS environments.
• Maintain production systems hosting Vault products.
• Contribute to feature design to improve reliability and user experience.
• Test and update disaster recovery strategies regularly.
• Document assets and runbooks for day-to-day operations.
• Mentor teammates to grow technical skills and Vault knowledge.

Skills

Python

Golang

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Observability

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Puppet

Docker

Job description

Thought Machine's mission is bold - to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.

We have grown rapidly in the past few years - growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more.

We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years-and a UK Best Employer for 2026.

Duties:

• Supporting the product engineering teams in building highly fault-tolerant, scalable applications by participating in design discussions, engaging in RFCs and code reviews.
• Executing various department strategies - contributing to the design and scoping work for team members around disaster recovery, backup, redundancy and capacity planning activities.
• Being part of a global on-call rotation responsible for identifying and fixing bottlenecks in SaaS customer environments.
• Regular maintenance of production systems that host Vault products.
• Driving the evolution of our SaaS products by defining and designing features that foster exceptional reliability and an unparalleled user experience.
• Implementing and regularly testing DR strategies to ensure the highest level of resilience and fault tolerance of the platform.
• Maintain and promote high-quality written documentation of assets, processes and runbooks that are used by the team in their day-to-day operations,
• Working with your Manager in growing team members in their technical skills as well as their understanding of Vault Products.

Requirements:

• You have a track record of delivering high-impact projects with focus on long-term scalability, ensuring that human intervention scales sub-linearly with usage growth.
• You possess an up-to-date understanding of design patterns relevant to hosting and networking architectures.
• You proactively champion product development, driven by a desire to build truly exceptional products, not just solve immediate challenges.
• You're a high-agency individual who can independently drive projects to completion by effectively scaling your individual output with the appropriate delegation of work to team members.
• You have a strong background working in either Python, Golang having used one of these programming languages to execute a significantly sized project or initiative.
• You have experience working with Kubernetes or other container orchestration systems.
• You have experience with automation/configuration management, e.g. Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Ansible.
• You have expertise in one or more of the following areas: Database Administration, Networking, Observability Tools (such as Prometheus, Jaeger) or automation infrastructure.
• You have extensive experience working with either GCP or AWS.

Benefits:

• Highly competitive sal