SRE Technical Lead - SC Cleared

F5 Consultants; Reading; Hybrid; GBP 95,000 - 116,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

5% bonus

Hybrid working in Reading area

Professional development

Flexible benefits

Job summary

F5 Consultants is seeking an experienced SRE Technical Lead to drive reliability on a major UK Critical National Infrastructure programme. The role combines strong Kubernetes/OpenShift expertise with deep SRE leadership across multiple teams and suppliers, owning reliability standards and ensuring stable, scalable platforms.

You will define SRE strategy, drive observability, automation, IaC and blameless post-incident improvements, while mentoring senior engineers and maintaining a high-security

Qualifications

• Strong commercial experience with Kubernetes and OpenShift

Responsibilities

• Define and drive SRE strategy, including SLAs, SLOs, error budgets and reliability standards
• Provide technical leadership across complex Kubernetes and OpenShift environments
• Drive automation across monitoring, incident response, recovery and remediation
• Shape observability, capacity management and operational readiness practices
• Act as a senior technical escalation point for major incidents and high-risk releases
• Lead reliability reviews, toil reduction and blameless post-incident improvements
• Govern reliability-focused IaC, GitOps and CI/CD practices
• Mentor Senior SREs and engineers, raising engineering standards across multiple teams and suppliers

Skills

Kubernetes

OpenShift

SRE

SLAs SLOs

Observability

Prometheus

Grafana

Loki

Tempo

OpenTelemetry

IaC

GitOps

Helm

Kustomize

ArgoCD

Tekton

Multi-cloud

CI/CD

Leadership

SC clearance

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Loki

Tempo

OpenTelemetry

ArgoCD

Tekton

Istio

Red Hat ACM/ACS

Submariner

PostgreSQL Enterprise

Job description

We’re looking for an experienced SRE Technical Lead to take a leading role within a major UK Critical National Infrastructure programme.

This is a senior technical leadership position for someone who can combine strong Kubernetes and OpenShift expertise with genuine Site Reliability Engineering experience.

You’ll act as the technical authority for SRE across multiple teams and suppliers, owning reliability standards and helping ensure complex, business-critical platforms remain stable, scalable and resilient.

What you'll be doing

• Define and drive SRE strategy, including SLAs, SLOs, error budgets and reliability standards
• Provide technical leadership across complex Kubernetes and OpenShift environments
• Drive automation across monitoring, incident response, recovery and remediation
• Shape observability, capacity management and operational readiness practices
• Act as a senior technical escalation point for major incidents and high-risk releases
• Lead reliability reviews, toil reduction and blameless post-incident improvements
• Govern reliability-focused IaC, GitOps and CI/CD practices
• Mentor Senior SREs and engineers, raising engineering standards across multiple teams and suppliers

What we're looking for

• Strong commercial experience with Kubernetes and OpenShift
• Proven SRE/reliability engineering experience within large-scale production environments
• Experience defining or working with SLAs, SLOs and error budgets
• Strong observability experience with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo or OpenTelemetry
• Strong Infrastructure as Code and GitOps experience – ideally Helm, Kustomize, ArgoCD and/or Tekton
• Experience across multi-cloud or hybrid environments
• Strong CI/CD and automation experience
• Ability to provide technical leadership, influence engineering teams and mentor others without relying on formal line management
• Active SC clearance

Experience with Istio, Red Hat ACM/ACS, Submariner or enterprise Postgres would be advantageous.

What's on offer

• Up to £105,000 + 5% bonus, with some flexibility for the right person
• Hybrid working in the Reading area
• Opportunity to become the SRE technical authority on a major Critical National Infrastructure programme
• Modern Kubernetes/OpenShift environment with genuine scope to shape reliability engineering practices
• Extensive professional development, certifications and long-term career progression
• Flexible benefits and a strong focus on employee wellbeing