Senior SRE Squad Lead: Hybrid Cloud & Reliability

Inspire People; Livingston; Hybrid; GBP 64,000 - 80,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Civil Service pension

25 days annual leave (rising)

Volunteer days

Learning & development

Certifications & training

Cycle-to-work

Inclusive culture

Civil Service benefits

Job summary

Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) is recruiting a Senior SRE Squad Lead to guide engineers while contributing hands-on in cloud-first platform delivery. You will shape reliable, scalable services and drive SRE best practices across the DDaT directorate.

Based in the UK with hybrid working, you will mentor teams, define SLIs/SLOs, advance observability and CI/CD, and partner with product and architecture to meet user needs while maintaining security and compliance.

Qualifications

• Experience leading, supporting and developing engineers, including line management or strong mentoring experience.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly and build effective relationships with a range of stakeholders.
• Experience of working with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, applying modern DevOps and SRE practices.
• Experience designing and delivering infrastructure-as-code solutions using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation or similar.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable and well-tested code in at least one programming language.
• Experience designing, operating and improving distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead and support a team of Site Reliability Engineers, setting clear direction while fostering an inclusive, collaborative and high-performing team culture.
• Build strong working relationships with product, delivery and architecture colleagues to ensure platform services meet business and user needs.
• Provide technical leadership across DevOps and SRE practices, guiding teams to adopt approaches that support reliability, sustainability and continuous improvement.
• Coach, mentor and support engineers across DDaT, contributing to a supportive and diverse engineering community.
• Design, build and maintain reliable, secure and scalable cloud-based infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches.
• Enable teams to develop effective observability practices, including monitoring, logging, metrics and alerting that support proactive service management.
• Work with teams to define and embed Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets in a pragmatic and user-focused way.
• Support the development and continual improvement of CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, frequent and low-risk delivery of changes.
• Oversee live service reliability, supporting teams through incident and problem management while encouraging a learning-focused, blameless culture.
• Ensure security, resilience and compliance considerations are understood and embedded into engineering practices.

Skills

Line management

Mentoring

DevOps

SRE practices

Cloud platforms

Terraform

CloudFormation

Observability

CI/CD

Security focus

Communication

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Job description

Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) is recruiting a Senior SRE Squad Lead to guide engineers while contributing hands-on in cloud-first platform delivery. You will shape reliable, scalable services and drive SRE best practices across the DDaT directorate.

Based in the UK with hybrid working, you will mentor teams, define SLIs/SLOs, advance observability and CI/CD, and partner with product and architecture to meet user needs while maintaining security and compliance.