Software Engineer Lead - Site Reliability

Standard Life; City of Westminster; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Standard Life in City of Westminster, UK, is seeking a Lead DevOps Engineer to strengthen the Customer Digital Platform by delivering immediate engineering improvements, focusing on Azure API platform integration, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD automation, observability and deployment safety.

You will lead hands-on coding and technical direction across squads, partners and security teams, applying SRE and DORA-like metrics, improving monitoring, incident learning and recovery capabilities, and

Qualifications

• Lead DevOps transformation across the Customer Digital Platform.
• Strong Azure DevOps and API platform experience.
• Experience with IaC, CI/CD, operational readiness and reliability practices.

Responsibilities

• Deliver immediate DevOps improvements across the Customer Digital Platform.
• Strengthen CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, GitHub/GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Terraform and automated testing.
• Improve deployment safety, release readiness and operational readiness for customer-facing digital services.
• Embed reliability, security, performance and operational-readiness into engineering delivery.
• Support major incidents, post-incident reviews and root-cause analysis, ensuring improvement actions are owned and delivered.
• Coach engineers in modern engineering practices, automation and AI-enabled delivery where it improves quality and throughput.

Skills

Azure expertise

Terraform

GitHub Actions

CI/CD pipelines

SRE principles

Monitoring/Observability

Incident management

Technical leadership

Cloud infrastructure

Automation/testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Azure DevOps

Terraform

GitHub

Kubernetes

Azure API Management

Job description

This role is focused on making immediate, practical improvements across the Customer Digital Platform. You'll strength our DevOps foundations across Azure API platform integration, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD automation, observability, deployment safety and operational readiness, working closely with internal squads, strategic partners and third parties., As a Lead DevOps Engineer, you will be a hands-on contributor and technical lead focused on improving the engineering foundations of the Customer Digital Platform. You will work across internal squads and with strategic partners, third parties, service, architecture and security teams to improve Azure API platform change, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, deployment safety, release readiness, monitoring, alerting and recovery capability.,

• Deliver immediate DevOps improvements across the Customer Digital Platform, with a focus on practical engineering outcomes.
• Improve Azure API platform integration, cloud infrastructure, environment support and route-to-live activity.
• Strengthen CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, GitHub/GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Terraform and automated testing.
• Improve deployment safety, release readiness and operational readiness for customer-facing digital services.
• Apply SRE principles pragmatically to improve availability, recoverability, monitoring and incident learning.
• Strengthen monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting and service-health dashboards across digitally connected workloads.
• Reduce single points of failure and improve failover, degradation handling and recovery testing.
• Embed reliability, security, performance and operational-readiness expectations into engineering delivery.
• Support major incidents, post-incident reviews and root-cause analysis, ensuring improvement actions are owned and delivered.
• Use DORA, availability, recovery and operational metrics to identify risks and evidence progress.
• Enable practical AI adoption across the SDLC, including developer tooling, code quality, testing, documentation and delivery-flow improvements.
• Work with strategic partners, third parties and other suppliers to improve DevOps capability, technical escalation, service improvement and knowledge transfer.
• Coach engineers in modern engineering practices, automation and AI-enabled delivery where it improves quality and throughput.
  Significant experience as a DevOps Lead, Senior DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer or hands-on technical lead.
• A proactive, self-starting approach with evidence of identifying issues, shaping solutions and delivering improvements without heavy direction.
• Strong practical Azure experience, including Azure DevOps, Azure API Management or comparable API platform capabilities.
• Hands-on expertise in Terraform, GitHub, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipeline design, deployment automation and release support.
• Practical knowledge of incident management, problem management, root-cause analysis and operational readiness.
• Good awareness of Site Reliability Engineering principles, with the ability to apply them pragmatically to DevOps and platform improvement work.
• Experience improving observability through monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, service-health dashboards and actionable telemetry.
• Experience improving resilience through failover, graceful degradation, recovery testing and practical reliability improvements.
• Understanding of deployment safety, release automation, progressive delivery, performance and reliability engineering techniques.
Experience using or shaping AI-enabled engineering practices across the SDLC, such as AI-assisted coding, automated testing, code review, documentation and developer productivity improvements.
If you're a proactive, self-starting engineer who enjoys getting things done and improving the reliability of live digital services, Standard Life could be the place for you. We're looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer to join our Digital Engineering team., We're Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone's journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we've been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.
• Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.