Senior SRE: Azure Cloud Platform & Observability Leader

Spectrum IT Recruitment; Southampton; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Spectrum IT Recruitment seeks a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our client in Southampton, a hybrid role focused on ensuring Azure-based cloud platforms are observable, scalable and secure. You will drive automation, mentoring across Cloud Operations, and cost-efficient improvements.

You’ll bring expert Azure and Kubernetes skills, plus hands-on experience with monitoring stacks, IaC, and incident leadership in live-service environments.

Qualifications

• At least six years' commercial experience within Site Reliability Engineering or a closely related cloud platform role.
• Demonstrable experience supporting business-critical cloud platforms and live production services.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of Microsoft Azure.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and containerised workloads, ideally using AKS.
• Extensive experience in platform engineering, cloud provisioning and observability.
• Strong monitoring, alerting and dashboarding experience using technologies such as: Azure Monitor, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch.
• Experience creating custom metrics, queries, dashboards and alerts for microservices.
• Advanced scripting or software development skills using PowerShell, Python, C# or a comparable language.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code experience using Bicep, ARM or Terraform.
• Experience using Git or another version-control platform.
• Good knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server, Elasticsearch and structured data formats including YAML, JSON and XML.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, cloud platforms and containerisation.
• Experience defining or working with SLOs, SLAs, SLIs and error budgets.
• Excellent troubleshooting and root-cause analysis skills.
• Experience designing scalable, secure and maintainable cloud solutions.
• Strong understanding of cybersecurity principles, governance and compliance.
• Experience operating across both transformation projects and live-service environments.

Responsibilities

• Work as part of the Site Reliability Engineering team responsible for protecting and improving production environments.
• Manage and prioritise a technical backlog of reliability, scalability and operational improvements.
• Lead investigations into service outages, performance degradation, platform reliability and cloud expenditure.
• Conduct detailed root-cause analysis and ensure corrective actions are implemented.
• Identify repetitive operational activities and replace them with sustainable automation.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to Cloud Operations, Support, DevOps and Engineering teams.
• Establish and maintain service level objectives, service level agreements, service level indicators and error budgets.
• Design and implement monitoring, alerting and dashboarding across cloud platforms and microservices.
• Deploy and configure observability technologies including Grafana, Prometheus, Azure Monitor and OpenTelemetry.
• Develop custom application and platform metrics to improve operational visibility.
• Create advanced queries, dashboards and alerts for distributed microservices.
• Develop reusable Bicep or Terraform modules for monitoring and cloud infrastructure.
• Support and improve production Kubernetes environments, particularly Azure Kubernetes Service.
• Review and optimise platform performance, availability, security and cost.
• Contribute to cloud architecture, technical scoping and the implementation of scalable platform solutions.
• Support continuous improvement across deployment, provisioning and operational processes.
• Help ensure platforms and working practices meet relevant security, governance and compliance requirements.
• Explore opportunities to use AI-assisted tools to improve automation, troubleshooting and engineering productivity.

Skills

Azure engineering

Kubernetes & AKS

IaC (Bicep/Terraform)

Observability & monitoring

SRE/DevOps mindset

Tools

Azure Monitor

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

AKS

Terraform

Bicep

Job description

Spectrum IT Recruitment seeks a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our client in Southampton, a hybrid role focused on ensuring Azure-based cloud platforms are observable, scalable and secure. You will drive automation, mentoring across Cloud Operations, and cost-efficient improvements.

You’ll bring expert Azure and Kubernetes skills, plus hands-on experience with monitoring stacks, IaC, and incident leadership in live-service environments.