Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Barclays; Knutsford; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Barclays is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to drive reliability, scalability, and performance across critical banking systems. The role combines hands-on SRE work with advanced programming and a drive to embed SRE maturity across diverse stakeholders.

The role emphasizes data-driven improvement, blameless retrospectives, and the ability to communicate complex systems effectively to varied audiences.

Qualifications

• Experience with SRE practices and programming for SRE maturity.
• Strong data-driven decision making and ability to measure improvements.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts to diverse audiences.

Responsibilities

• Build engineering: develop reliable infrastructure solutions with measurable reliability and performance.
• Incident management: monitor, identify, address, and resolve issues to reduce MTTR.
• Automation: develop automated tasks to improve efficiency and reduce manual work.
• Security: implement secure configurations to protect infrastructure.
• Teamwork: collaborate with product managers, architects and engineers to align IT infrastructure with business goals.
• Learning: keep up with industry trends and contribute to tech communities.

Skills

SRE practices

Programming skills

Fault analysis

Data-driven improvements

Technical communication

Observability

Mentoring/Teaching

Tools

Automation tools

Infrastructure-as-code

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

Join us as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to drive reliability, scalability, and performance across our critical banking systems. This role involves hands-on SRE expertise, including advanced programming skills and the ability to embed SRE practices and maturity across diverse stakeholder groups.

To Be Successful In This Role You Should Have

• Demonstrated practical experience with SRE practices, including programming skills and ability to drive SRE maturity across stakeholder groups. Exhibits advanced fault analysis capabilities- troubleshooting and problem-solving utilizing the scientific method, hypothesis formation and validation, gathering evidence and drawing conclusions using inductive and deductive reasoning.
• Passion for continuous improvement through data insights, with a bias for action, controlled experimentation, and the fundamental belief that measurement is a prerequisite for improvement.
• Ability to facilitate technical discussions, conduct blameless retrospectives, explain complex systems to diverse audiences, and influence organizational direction through effective communication.
• Boundless curiosity for understanding complex systems and their sociotechnical interactions, with the ability to articulate these relationships through narrative, diagrams, and documentation.
• Keen interest in researching, evaluating and directly engaging with technologies to improve predictability, observability and performance, combined with enthusiasm for teaching others and lifelong learning.

Some Other Highly Valued Skills Include

• A deep understanding of systems engineering, including operating systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure, automation tools, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Interest and experience in innovative uses for artificial intelligence, solving technology problems faster and at greater scale.
• Experience with observability tools and techniques for instrumentation, gathering information and extending the boundaries of the known.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for this role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

This role can be based out of our Knutsford or Glasgow campus.

Purpose of the role

To build and maintain infrastructure platforms and products that support applications and data systems, using hardware, software, networks, and cloud computing platforms as required with the aim of ensuring that the infrastructure is reliable, scalable, and secure. Ensure the reliability, availability, and scalability of the systems, platforms, and technology through the application of software engineering techniques, automation, and best practices in incident response.

Accountabilities

• Build Engineering: Development, delivery, and maintenance of high-quality infrastructure solutions to fulfil business requirements ensuring measurable reliability, performance, availability, and ease of use. Including the identification of the appropriate technologies and solutions to meet business, optimisation, and resourcing requirements.
• Incident Management: Monitoring of IT infrastructure and system performance to measure, identify, address, and resolve any potential issues, vulnerabilities, or outages. Use of data to drive down mean time to resolution.
• Automation: Development and implementation of automated tasks and processes to improve efficiency and reduce manual intervention, utilising software scripting/coding disciplines.
• Security: Implementation of a secure configuration and measures to protect infrastructure against cyber-attacks, vulnerabilities, and other security threats, including protection of hardware, software, and data from unauthorised access.
• Teamwork: Cross-functional collaboration with product managers, architects, and other engineers to define IT Infrastructure requirements, devise solutions, and ensure seamless integration and alignment with business objectives via a data driven approach.
• Learning: Stay informed of industry technology trends and innovations, and actively contribute to the organization's technology communities to foster a culture of technical excellence and growth.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and elevate breaches of policies/procedures.
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements.
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L - Listen and be authentic, E - Energise and inspire, A - Align across the enterprise, D - Develop others.
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions.
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship - our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset - to Empower, Challenge and Drive - the operating manual for how we behave.