Service Reliability Lead

Mail Metrics; Leicester Forest East; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Mail Metrics is seeking a Service Reliability Lead to own the day-to-day technical operations, reliability and supportability of the platform. You will lead the engineering capability, drive incident response and RCA, and push continuous improvement to reduce operational risk.

The role covers hybrid working with travel to offices and customer sites, leading Product Support Engineers, Product Engineers and QA support, and coordinating with Service Operations on significant incidents.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading technical operations, production engineering or SRE teams.
• Strong incident response and root cause analysis capabilities.
• Advanced troubleshooting across distributed apps and production systems.
• Proficiency with logging, monitoring, tracing and observability tools to improve services.
• Solid SQL and database investigation skills.
• Experience with messaging patterns and asynchronous processing.
• Cloud infrastructure knowledge, especially AWS, and containerization (Kubernetes).
• Ability to prioritise workload between urgent issues and planned improvements.
• Excellent communication across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience with Agile delivery and Jira in regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the service reliability and operations team.
• Own day-to-day technical operation and prioritise workloads across demand and improvements.
• Act as senior escalation point for the Mail Metrics platform.
• Drive RCAs and ensure corrective actions are implemented and measured.
• Coordinate incident response with Service Operations and stakeholders.
• Improve observability, monitoring and alert quality to detect issues early.
• Analyse incidents and trends to identify recurring problems and improvements.
• Establish runbooks, handover standards and documentation practices.
• Engage with customers and account teams on technical operational matters.
• Contribute to change and release governance for operational fixes.

Skills

Team leadership

Incident management

Observability

SQL debugging

AWS

Kubernetes

PHP

Python

Go

Problem solving

Tools

Datadog

Grafana

Jira

ITSM (ServiceDesk Plus)

CI/CD pipelines

Docker

Kubernetes

Automation tooling

Job description

Are you an experienced technical leader passionate about building reliable platforms, developing high-performing teams and driving continuous improvement. If that’s you, we’d love to hear from you.

Main Purpose of the Role:

The Service Reliability Lead is a technical and people leader responsible for the day-to-day technical operation, reliability and supportability of the Mail Metrics platform.

The role exists to ensure the Mail Metrics platform remains reliable, recoverable and increasingly easier to operate through operational leadership, technical incident response and recovery, root cause analysis and continuous improvement.

The role leads the engineering capability supporting the Mail Metrics RUN investment theme, balancing operational demand with planned improvements that reduce operational risk, improve reliability, increase supportability and reduce reactive support effort over time.

The Service Reliability Lead is accountable for operational resilience, technical recovery, capability development and continuous service improvement. Success is achieved through improving the reliability and supportability of the platform rather than increasing support activity.

Location:

Huddersfield/Leicester/Dublin. Hybrid working with travel to Mail Metrics offices and customer locations as required. Participation in out-of-hours technical escalation and an on-call arrangement may be required.

Role Description:

• Lead and develop the team responsible for Mail Metrics service reliability and technical operations, including Product Support Engineers, Product Engineers and QA support.
• Own the day-to-day technical operation of the Mail Metrics platform and prioritise the team’s workload across operational demand, corrective engineering and planned reliability improvements.
• Act as the first technical and operational escalation point for the Mail Metrics platform.
• Lead technical investigation, diagnosis, containment and recovery, including direct technical contribution and implementation of corrective changes where appropriate.
• Coordinate the technical response with Service Operations across day-to-day service management and significant incidents, acting as the senior technical representative and SME where required.
• Drive root cause analysis and ensure corrective actions are identified, prioritised, delivered and measured.
• Improve platform observability, monitoring, telemetry and alert quality to increase early detection and reduce operational risk.
• Analyse operational trends, incidents and service requests to identify recurring issues and opportunities for improvement.
• Measure and report operational effectiveness, using trends and outcomes to demonstrate improvement and inform priorities.
• Deliver operational improvements that increase reliability, resilience, supportability and operational efficiency.
• Reduce operational risk and reactive demand through automation, process improvement, operational knowledge, cross-skilling and elimination of single points of failure.
• Build and maintain primary and secondary operational capability across critical platform capabilities.
• Establish operational standards for investigation, handover, documentation and escalation, including the maintenance of operational knowledge and runbooks.
• Identify and manage operational risks, including knowledge concentration, recovery gaps and unsupported failure modes.
• Provide operational insight, evidence and recommendations into Product, Engineering and governance decision-making.
• Escalate architectural, product or investment decisions to the appropriate stakeholders where they exceed the scope of operational improvement.
• Engage confidently with customers, account teams and internal stakeholders on technical operational matters.
• Contribute to change and release governance for operational fixes and service improvements.

Required Qualification/Experience/Skills:

• Experience leading, coordinating or developing technical teams within technical operations, production engineering, platform operations, SRE or a comparable environment.
• Experience leading technical incident response, production diagnosis and root cause analysis through to corrective action.
• Strong technical troubleshooting skills across distributed applications and production environments.
• Experience using logging, monitoring, tracing and observability tooling to investigate and improve production services.
• Strong SQL and database investigation skills.
• Experience working with messaging platforms and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS, and containerised environments such as Kubernetes.
• Experience prioritising operational workloads and balancing reactive demand with planned improvement activity.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience engaging with customers and stakeholders on technical operational matters.
• Takes ownership and follows issues through to resolution.
• Makes pragmatic, evidence-based decisions, including under pressure.
• Approaches complex problems with strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Focuses on removing recurring problems rather than repeatedly managing symptoms.
• Builds capability in others through coaching, knowledge sharing and constructive challenge.
• Builds effective relationships and credibility across technical, business and service teams.
• Balances immediate operational priorities with longer-term reliability and improvement.
• Experience working within a multi-tenant SaaS platform environment.
• Experience supporting high-volume communications, print, messaging or document-processing platforms.
• Familiarity with Datadog and/or Grafana.
• Ability to read and troubleshoot PHP, Python or Go applications.
• Experience with ServiceDesk Plus or similar ITSM platforms.
• Experience using Jira and working within Agile delivery environments.
• Experience with change and release governance.
• Experience working in regulated sectors such as insurance, banking or healthcare.
• Experience using automation and AI-assisted tooling to improve operational efficiency.
• Experience delivering operational resilience, reliability or service improvement initiatives.

Experience leading, coordinating or developing technical teams within technical operations, production engineering, platform operations, SRE or a comparable environment.