Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Finova; Salford; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working (3 days in office)

Private medical insurance

Life assurance & income protection

Family friendly policies

Work from anywhere up to 4 weeks/year

25 days holiday + public holidays

Company pension scheme

Employee assistance programme

Electric car salary sacrifice

Health cash plan

Gym discounts

Job summary

Finova, the UK’s leading lending technology provider, seeks a Senior Site Reliability Engineer in Manchester. You will join a reliability-focused function, owning observability and automated recovery across a financial platform that handles billions in loans and savings.

You’ll collaborate with platform engineering and infrastructure while shaping SLOs and incident response. You’ll bring deep experience in C#/.NET, cloud platforms (Azure/AWS, with GCP exposure), and OpenTelemetry.

Qualifications

• Proven software engineering and tooling track record.
• Strong proficiency in C#/.NET and scripting (PowerShell, Python or Go).
• Extensive production experience with Azure/AWS; familiarity with GCP is a plus.
• Expertise in OpenTelemetry and modern observability.
• Solid grounding in SRE principles including SLOs and error budgets.
• Autonomous problem solving with strong communication to stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own observability, automated recovery, and workflow automation across major platform areas.
• Eliminate toil via automated retries, self-healing architectures, and proactive fault detection.
• Partner with teams to define SLOs and allocate reliability investments using metrics.
• Act as incident commander for major outages and lead blameless post-incident reviews.
• Design and verify disaster recovery and failover processes; improve runbooks.

Skills

C# & .NET

Automation scripting

PowerShell

Python

Go

Azure

AWS

Google Cloud Platform

OpenTelemetry

SRE practices

Incident management

Stakeholder management

Tools

Azure

AWS

GCP

Job description

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Manchester - 3 days on-site)

About Finova

Finova is the UK's leading lending and savings technology provider, supporting one in every five mortgages nationwide. Our agile, cloud-native solutions enable over 60 banks, building societies, specialist lenders, equity release providers and a network of 2,400+ brokers to stay ahead in a competitive market.

Built on open architecture and backed by deep industry expertise, our platform is designed to scale. Each year, we process over £50 billion in loans, manage nearly £50 billion in savings, and support the digital servicing of more than 650,000 UK borrower accounts.

Be part of a team that’s driving innovation, enabling growth and shaping the future of UK lending.

For Lenders

Finova offers a flexible, modular technology suite designed to help lenders move faster, scale efficiently and deliver standout digital experiences.

Financial Institutions use Finova to launch products faster, process applications up to 50% more efficiently and reduce operational costs — all while staying fully compliant in a fast-moving market.

About the Role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer based in Manchester, you will join a newly formed reliability engineering function with significant scope to shape foundational practices across the organisation. Working closely with core platform engineering and infrastructure teams, your primary purpose will be to treat reliability as an engineering discipline, systematically engineering out operational toil rather than absorbing manual workloads. You will take end-to-end ownership of critical reliability domains across an enterprise financial services platform that processes more than £50 billion in loans annually, driving resilience as our technology landscape modernises onto Google Cloud Platform.

About you

• Proven track record in software engineering and tooling development, ideally featuring solid proficiency in C# and .NET, alongside automation scripting in PowerShell, Python, or Go.
• Substantial production experience running distributed architectures across Azure or AWS, with prior exposure to Google Cloud Platform regarded as a distinct advantage.
• In-depth expertise in modern observability frameworks, particularly OpenTelemetry, covering instrumentation design, telemetry pipelines, and targeted alerting strategies.
• Practical mastery of Site Reliability Engineering principles, including the implementation of Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and systemic toil reduction.
• Demonstrated autonomy with the ability to investigate ambiguous reliability issues and deliver robust, scalable engineering solutions independently.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, capable of influencing development teams to embed resilience directly into their software design cycles.

What will you be doing

• Taking comprehensive ownership of observability, automated recovery, or workflow automation across major segments of Finova's financial platform.
• Identifying operational friction points and eliminating toil permanently through automated retries, self-healing architecture, and proactive fault detection.
• Partnering with engineering teams to establish meaningful SLOs and error budgets, using operational metrics to prioritise reliability investments.
• Participating in a compensated escalation rota, acting as incident commander for critical outages, and leading blameless post-incident reviews to ensure corrective actions are completed.
• Designing and executing comprehensive failover and disaster recovery verification programmes to uphold contractual client commitments.
• Raising engineering standards across the organisation through active mentorship, code reviews, and the creation of clear runbooks that empower support teams to resolve issues efficiently.

What We Offer

• Hybrid working We operate on a hybrid model that is primarily office-based, requiring three days in the office each week, with the flexibility to work remotely for the remainder.
• Private medical insurance Comprehensive health cover, with the option to add your family to your plan, because your well-being matters to us.
• Life assurance & income protection We provide life assurance and income protection to give you peace of mind for the future
• Family friendly policies Our enhanced family-friendly policy goes beyond maternity and paternity leave, offering paid time off for when plans change or alternative paths to parenthood are needed.
• Work from anywhere Some thrive in the office, others at home — and many do best with choice. With approval, Finova employees can work abroad for up to 4 weeks each year.
• Flexible holiday package Enjoy 25 days paid holiday allowance, plus all public holidays. And, you can rebook any public holidays for a day that aligns with your personal beliefs or celebration calendar. We also offer holiday trading allowing you to purchase or sell your holiday allowance.
• Company pension scheme With salary exchange, you save on tax and can build a secure future.
• Employee assistance programme We understand that mental health is just as important as physical health. Access to a 24/7 confidential counselling helpline ensures you have support when you need it.
• Electric car scheme Get a brand-new electric vehicle with salary sacrifice as a benefit, paid for through your gross monthly pay, saving on Income Tax and National Insurance.
• Health cash plan Our Health Cash Plan empowers you to prioritise your wellbeing by providing effortless reimbursement for everyday healthcare costs, from dental and optical visits to physiotherapy.
• Gym discounts Achieve your fitness goals for less with GymFlex, which offers significant savings on annual memberships at over 3,000 gyms and leisure centers nationwide.
• Perks that matter We fuel your day with a fully stocked pantry of fresh fruit and snacks and keep the team spirit high with weekly socials and events.

Equal Opportunity Statement

We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. If you’re passionate about this role but don’t meet all the criteria, please reach out, we’d love to discuss how your skills and experiences align with our needs.