Senior Site Reliability Engineer

GCS Recruitment; Knutsford; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

GCS Recruitment seeks a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to drive reliability, scalability and performance across critical banking systems. The role blends hands-on SRE work with technical leadership, focusing on observability, automation and continuous improvement.

With 5+ years in SRE or related roles, you will lead incidents, implement IaC practices, and guide teams toward higher reliability maturity while collaborating with architects and stakeholders in a hybrid setup.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in SRE or related role.
• Strong skills in Python/Go/Java/Bash.
• Experience with incident management and RCA.
• Deep observability and monitoring experience.
• Cloud platforms: AWS/Azure/GCP.
• IaC and automation focus.
• Excellent communication and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Build, scale, and secure infra platforms and services.
• Apply SRE practices to improve reliability and performance.
• Monitor, manage incidents, perform root cause analysis.
• Develop automation to reduce manual work.
• Improve observability, instrumentation and metrics.
• Use reliability data to drive improvements.
• Lead discussions, blameless retrospectives and problem solving.
• Collaborate with architects and engineers to deliver solutions.
• Provide technical leadership and mentor teams toward SRE maturity.

Skills

SRE principles

Incident management

Observability

Cloud platforms

IaC

Leadership

SRE tooling

Programming scripts

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Role Title: Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Location: Knutsford or Glasgow - Hybrid (2 days per week onsite)
Role Category: Permanent

Overview

We’re recruiting for an experienced Senior Site Reliability Engineer to drive reliability, scalability and performance across critical banking systems. This role combines hands‑on SRE engineering with technical leadership, with a strong focus on observability, automation, continuous improvement and optimisation.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure platforms and solutions.
• Apply SRE and software engineering practices to improve reliability, availability and performance.
• Monitor systems, manage incidents and lead complex troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
• Develop automation using programming and scripting to reduce manual intervention and improve efficiency.
• Develop and improve observability, monitoring, instrumentation and performance capabilities.
• Use data and reliability metrics to drive continuous improvement and optimisation.
• Lead technical discussions, blameless retrospectives and problem‑solving activities.
• Work with architects, engineers and stakeholders to define requirements and deliver effective solutions.
• Provide technical leadership, mentoring and guidance while helping to drive SRE maturity across teams.

Required Skills

• 5+ years' experience in SRE, Production Engineering, Platform Engineering or a related discipline.
• Strong practical experience with SRE principles and production environments.
• Strong programming/scripting skills, such as Python, Go, Java, C# or Bash.
• Proven experience in incident management, troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
• Strong observability and monitoring experience.
• Experience with AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Good understanding of operating systems, networking, cloud infrastructure and automation.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Strong communication and technical leadership skills.

Desirable Skills

• SLOs, SLIs, SLAs and error budgets.
• Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic/ELK or OpenTelemetry.
• Kubernetes, containers and distributed systems.
• Performance and resilience engineering.
• Experience driving SRE maturity across engineering teams.
• Financial services or banking experience.

This is an excellent opportunity for a Senior SRE to combine hands‑on engineering with technical leadership and help improve reliability, observability and performance across critical banking systems.