SRE Technical Lead - SC Cleared

F5 Consultants; Reading; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

F5 Consultants is recruiting an SRE Technical Lead for a major UK Critical National Infrastructure programme. Based in the Reading area with hybrid working, the role offers a salary up to £105,000 plus bonus and a focus on reliability.

You will provide technical leadership across complex Kubernetes and OpenShift environments, drive automation and observability, and mentor senior engineers to raise engineering standards. This is a senior, high-impact position.

Qualifications

• Active SC clearance.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes and OpenShift.
• Proven SRE or reliability engineering in large-scale environments.
• Experience defining SLAs, SLOs and error budgets.
• Strong observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo or OpenTelemetry.
• Infrastructure as Code and GitOps with Helm, Kustomize, ArgoCD or Tekton.
• Experience across multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
• Strong CI/CD and automation experience.
• Ability to provide technical leadership and mentor teams.
• Experience with Istio, Red Hat ACM/ACS, Submariner or enterprise Postgres is advantageous.

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 Infrastructure as Code, GitOps and CI/CD practices.
• Mentor Senior SREs and engineers, raising engineering standards across multiple teams and suppliers.

Skills

Kubernetes

OpenShift

SRE leadership

SLAs & SLOs

Observability

IaC & GitOps

CI/CD automation

Multi-cloud

Mentoring

Technical leadership

Tools

ArgoCD

Grafana

Prometheus

Loki

Tempo

OpenTelemetry

Helm

Kustomize

Tekton

OpenShift

Kubernetes

Job description

Salary: £100,000 - 100,000 per year

Requirements:

• Active SC clearance
• Strong commercial experience with Kubernetes and OpenShift
• Proven SRE or reliability engineering experience in 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 with Helm, Kustomize, ArgoCD 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
• Experience with Istio, Red Hat ACM/ACS, Submariner or enterprise Postgres is advantageous

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 Infrastructure as Code, GitOps and CI/CD practices
• Mentor Senior SREs and engineers, raising engineering standards across multiple teams and suppliers

Technologies:

• ArgoCD
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• GitOps
• Grafana
• Helm
• Istio
• Kubernetes
• Kustomize
• OpenTelemetry
• OpenShift
• PLC
• Prometheus
• DevOps

More:

We are recruiting an SRE Technical Lead for a major UK Critical National Infrastructure programme. This is a senior technical leadership role in a modern Kubernetes and OpenShift environment, with the opportunity to become the SRE technical authority and shape reliability engineering practices. The role is based in the Reading area with hybrid working and offers a salary of up to £105,000 plus bonus, professional development, certifications, long-term career progression, flexible benefits and a focus on employee wellbeing.