Senior SRE Squad Lead: Cloud Reliability & Platform Strategy

Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade; Belfast City District; Hybrid; GBP 64,000 - 80,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hybrid working

Civil Service pension

Annual leave 25–30 days

Volunteer days

Learning & development

Cycle-to-work

Job summary

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) seeks a Senior SRE Squad Lead to steer a team of engineers, drive reliability, and shape platform services across government digital products. You will lead DevOps and SRE practices, advocate for observability, and ensure security and resilience are embedded in engineering work.

Based in a flexible hybrid setup with 2–3 days in office, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams, mentor engineers, and help define SLIs/SLOs to

Qualifications

• Experience leading, supporting and developing engineers, including line management or mentoring.
• Strong communication skills to explain technical concepts to diverse stakeholders.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud) and IaC tooling.
• Ability to write maintainable code and work on distributed systems with focus on reliability.

Responsibilities

• Lead and support a team of Site Reliability Engineers, setting direction and culture.
• Collaborate with product, delivery and architecture to ensure platform services meet needs.
• Provide technical leadership across DevOps and SRE practices.
• Coach and mentor engineers across DDaT and foster an inclusive engineering community.
• Design and maintain cloud infrastructure using IaC approaches.
• Establish observability practices: monitoring, logging, metrics, alerting.
• Define SLIs, SLOs and error budgets in a pragmatic, user-focused way.
• Support CI/CD pipelines for frequent, low-risk deployments.
• Oversee live service reliability, incident and problem management with blameless culture.
• Embed security, resilience and compliance into engineering practices.

Skills

Team leadership

DevOps practices

Cloud platforms

Site Reliability Engineering

Infrastructure as Code

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Job description

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) seeks a Senior SRE Squad Lead to steer a team of engineers, drive reliability, and shape platform services across government digital products. You will lead DevOps and SRE practices, advocate for observability, and ensure security and resilience are embedded in engineering work.

Based in a flexible hybrid setup with 2–3 days in office, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams, mentor engineers, and help define SLIs/SLOs to