Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Application / API Focused)

Xpertise Recruitment; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25% Bonus

Excellent Benefits

Job summary

A leading recruitment firm is looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer specializing in application and API reliability. This hybrid role involves working closely with product and engineering teams to enhance the reliability of customer-facing platforms. Candidates should have a strong background in digital product environments and expertise in API architectures, microservices, and observability tools. Excellent salary and benefits package offered.

Qualifications

• Proven experience operating as an SRE within digital product environments.
• Strong understanding of API architectures and microservices.
• Hands-on experience defining SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.

Responsibilities

• Embed SRE practices across API and microservices-based architectures.
• Define and own meaningful SLIs/SLOs aligned to customer journeys.
• Improve service reliability through proactive observability and alert tuning.

Skills

API architectures

Microservices

Distributed systems behaviour

Observability tools (Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus)

Incident response

Kubernetes

Tools

Datadog

Splunk

Prometheus

Job description

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Application / API Focused)

Location: London (Hybrid)

Salary: £100,000 per annum + 25% Bonus + Excellent Benefits

We are hiring a Senior SRE to support a large-scale digital organisation undergoing a major commercial re-platforming across web and mobile channels.

This role sits much closer to the application layer than traditional infrastructure SRE positions. You will work directly with product and engineering teams across customer-facing platforms (web, mobile, payment journeys, APIs) to improve reliability, resilience, and service behaviour in production.

This is not a ticket-driven operational role and not a pure platform engineering post. It is about embedding measurable reliability into distributed systems at service level.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Embed SRE practices across API and microservices-based architectures
• Define and own meaningful SLIs/SLOs aligned to customer journeys and business-critical flows
• Improve service reliability through proactive observability, tracing, telemetry and alert tuning
• Partner closely with backend and platform engineers to reduce systemic failure modes
• Lead and contribute to incident response, post-incident reviews and resilience improvements
• Move the organisation from symptom-based alerting to customer-impact driven diagnostics
• Contribute to release safety, progressive deployments and production guardrails

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience operating as an SRE within digital product environments
• Strong understanding of API architectures, microservices and distributed systems behaviour
• Hands-on experience defining and implementing SLIs, SLOs and error budgets
• Deep observability exposure (e.g. Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, tracing/APM platforms)
• Experience working closely with application engineering teams, not just infrastructure teams
• Background in high-availability, customer-facing systems where outages have commercial impact
• Cloud-native exposure (AWS preferred) with practical understanding of Kubernetes environments

Important

This role is best suited to engineers who care deeply about production behaviour, customer experience in failure scenarios, and reliability as a first-class product feature, rather than engineers focused purely on infrastructure provisioning or CI/CD enablement.

Please get in touch with Benjamin Applewhaite to discuss the role in confidence.