Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

Abundant Code; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Google in London is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Site Reliability Engineering. You will apply software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant systems, ensuring reliability and uptime for Google Cloud services.

You’ll design, implement, and operate resilient infrastructure, automate toil, and contribute to a blameless postmortem culture. This role emphasizes coding, systems design, and collaboration across teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages.
• 3 years of experience leading projects.
• 3 years of experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services—from inception and design, through to deployment, operation and refinement.
• Support services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning and launch reviews.
• Maintain services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.
• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.
• Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Project leadership

Software development

Go or Python

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Master’s degree in CS or Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Loki

Alertmanager

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering Overview

Company Name: Google

Job Role: Staff Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

Qualifications: Not specified

Category: I

Job Type: Full Time

Location: London, UK

What we're looking for

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages.
• 3 years of experience leading projects.
• 3 years of experience designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering.
• Experience administering, debugging, and scaling Kubernetes clusters in complex, enterprise production environments.
• Experience applying core SRE principles—such as defining SLIs/SLOs, driving down toil, and performing root cause analysis—to distributed systems.
• Experience configuring and using modern monitoring and logging stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager).
• Proficiency in Golang or Python to build custom horizontal tooling, infrastructure controllers, and operational automation.
• Strong foundation in Linux/UNIX internals and core networking concepts (e.g., TCP/IP, routing, load balancing, SDN).

The role

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, fault‑tolerant systems. SRE ensures that Google Cloud’s services‑both our internally critical and our externally‑visible systems‑have reliability, uptime appropriate to customer’s needs and a fast rate of improvement. Additionally SRE’s will keep an ever‑watchful eye on our systems capacity and performance.

Much of our software development focuses on optimizing existing systems, building infrastructure and eliminating work through automation. On the SRE team, you’ll have the opportunity to manage the complex challenges of scale which are unique to Google Cloud, while using your expertise in coding, algorithms, complexity analysis and large‑scale system design. SRE’s culture of intellectual curiosity, problem solving and openness is key to its success. Our organization brings together people with a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We encourage them to collaborate, think big and take risks in a blame‑free environment. We promote self‑direction to work on meaningful projects, while we also strive to create an environment that provides the support and mentorship needed to learn and grow.

The Google Distributed Cloud SRE team is reshaping how reliability is delivered for one of Google’s most unique platforms. GDC is a bundled hardware and software solution designed to meet the most stringent sovereignty requirements. Because our customers operate these environments themselves, our SRE team has a unique mission: we engineer reliability directly into the product life‑cycle.

Behind everything our users see online is the architecture built by the Technical Infrastructure team to keep it running. From developing and maintaining our data centers to building the next generation of Google platforms, we make Google’s product portfolio possible. We’re proud to be our engineers’ engineers and love voiding warranties by taking things apart so we can rebuild them. We keep our networks up and running, ensuring our users have the best and fastest experience possible.

What you'll do

• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services-from inception and design, through to deployment, operation and refinement.
• Support services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning and launch reviews.
• Maintain services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.
• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.
• Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems.

Visa sponsorship: check with employer