Team Lead, On-Call Automation and Reliability (London)

Fresha; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Fresha is seeking a hands-on Team Lead for On-Call Automation and Reliability in London. You will lead a new team, owning alerting, incident tooling, SLOs, postmortems, and AI agents for first-line triage. Engineering leadership, automation, and security practice are core to the role.

You will mentor engineers, shape incident response, and drive reliability across services, balancing fast delivery with safe, auditable operations in a highly automated environment.

Qualifications

• Hands-on production coding in at least one general-purpose language.
• Production experience on-call for systems at scale.
• Automation you can trust with safe practices.
• Experience with AI agents or LLM-based tooling.
• Security-minded design for agents with production access.
• Cloud and observability across the stack (AWS/Kubernetes).
• You have led a team, formally or as a senior engineer.
• Product mindset: track adoption and outcomes, roadmaps.
• Ability to write clear postmortems.

Responsibilities

• Build and run AI agents that triage alerts and suggest causes.
• Cut alert noise and improve signal quality for teams.
• Own SLO and error budget tooling and reliability scorecards.
• Own incident processes, postmortems, and follow-up actions.
• Make detection and rollback fast with minimal humans in the loop.
• Run game days and DR drills; prepare on-call rotas for peaks.
• Own on-call for services your team owns and respond to incidents.
• Write and review code; resolve incidents with your team.

Skills

Hands-on coding

Production on-call experience

Automation engineering

AI agents

Security-minded

Cloud/Observability

Team leadership

Product mindset

Postmortems

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Kafka

Postgres

Ruby

Elixir

TypeScript

GraphQL

Job description

About Fresha

Fresha is the leading AI-powered operating system for the global beauty and wellness industry, giving businesses everything they need to run smarter, grow faster and build stronger client relationships.

In May 2026, Fresha secured an $80M growth investment from KKR at a valuation of $1B, officially reaching unicorn status and bringing total funding raised to $285M. Already profitable, Fresha is using this investment to accelerate global expansion and drive the next generation of AI and product innovation.

Today, Fresha operates at global scale, with offices across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Our platform is trusted by 130,000+ beauty and wellness businesses across 120 countries, with more than 1.5 billion appointments booked to date.

Our mission is simple: help beauty and wellness businesses grow by giving them the technology they need to attract clients, manage their operations and run their business in one place.

We’re continuing to scale rapidly across markets, teams and products, making this an exciting time to join us.

Role Overview:

Team Lead, On-Call Automation and Reliability| The Bower, 207-211, Old St, Tower, London EC1V 9NR | Four days in office, Wednesdays remote

We're looking for a hands‑on Team Lead for a new team. You'll report to the Head of Infrastructure. Your team owns what every engineer at Fresha uses when production breaks: alerting and paging, incident tooling, SLO and error budget tooling, the postmortem process, and the AI agents that do first‑line triage.

Our product teams own their services and their on‑call. Your team's job is to make that on‑call quiet, fast and safe. A page should reach a human only when a human is needed. When it does, the context and a likely cause should already be there.

This is a software engineering team, not an operations desk. You build agents and automation that act on production, so you need to know when automation must stop and ask a person. You're also the line manager for everyone on the team.

We use AI as much as we can. Every engineer gets Claude/Codex/etc from day one, and we're building autonomous agents for SRE work. Your team takes that the furthest.

How We Build

• Production first: We have no pre‑production environments. We test locally, validate in CI, ship behind feature flags, and hold a high quality bar. We ship with confidence because the platform makes it safe.

• Unix philosophy: Each service does one thing well behind a clear interface, and complexity stays at the edges. We optimise for rate of change: an engineer with one year of experience should be able to make a change quickly.

• Optional adoption, mandatory value: Teams choose their tools. Platform features win by being better, not by force. Only security and compliance are non‑negotiable.

• Automate first, document second: A check that blocks the merge beats a page nobody reads. We still write down context and decisions, for people and for AI.

• Independent teams: Tribes own their code, deployments, on‑call and roadmaps. The platform gives them what they need without waiting on anyone.

What You'll Do

Technical leadership and delivery

• Build and run the AI agents that triage alerts, collect context, suggest a cause, and run safe fixes inside clear guardrails.

• Cut alert noise. Measure alert quality per team, and work with teams to fix or delete the alerts that don't help.

• Own SLO and error budget tooling, and the reliability scorecard each team sees.

• Own the incident process and tooling: roles, communication, postmortems, and follow‑up on the actions.

• Make detection and rollback fast. With no staging environment, the minutes after a deploy are where we catch problems.

• Run game days and disaster recovery drills, and get the on‑call rotas ready for seasonal peaks.

• Run on‑call for the services your team owns.

• Write code, review it, and work through incidents alongside your team.

People leadership

• Run your team: Know what each person is working on and where they're stuck, and step in quickly when someone is struggling.

• Feedback and growth: Give feedback when it happens, help your engineers grow, and make the case for them when they're ready.

• Hiring: Interview for your team and hold the bar on who joins.

Our stack: Kubernetes on AWS, Terraform, Kafka and Postgres. Services in Ruby, Elixir and TypeScript behind a federated GraphQL layer.

What We're Looking For

• Hands‑on first: You write production code in at least one general‑purpose language. If you've moved away from building and don't want to come back to it, this isn't the role for you.

• Production experience: You've been on call for systems at scale, and you've led incidents as incident commander.

• Automation you can trust: You've built automation that changes production, and you know how to make it safe: dry runs, limits, audit trails, and a human in the loop where it counts.

• AI agents: You've put LLM-based tools or agents into real use, or you can show serious work toward it. You know where they help and where they fail.

• Security: An agent with production access is a security risk. You design for least privilege and full audit from the start.

• Cloud and observability: AWS, Kubernetes, and metrics, logs and traces at scale.

• You've led a team: Formally, or as a senior engineer people already followed.

• Product mindset: Engineers are your users. You track adoption and outcomes, run a roadmap, and say no to the wrong work.

• Opinionated and clear: You write postmortems people read, and you can persuade a product team to change how they run their service.

At Fresha, we value passion and potential as much as specific skills. If you're enthusiastic and eager to learn, we encourage you to apply, even if you don't meet every listed requirement.

Your Opportunity at Fresha

• Scale: Around 1 million bookings a day across 120 countries, and the payments that go with them, running on a platform we're breaking out of its monoliths while it serves traffic.

• A new team: You shape its scope, its tools and its people from the start.

• AI in production: Agents that do real on‑call work, not demos.

Interview Process

• Screen Call - Video call with a member of the Talent Team (30min)

• 1st Stage - Technical video/in‑person interview with our engineers (90min)

• 2nd Stage - Practical coding session plus design of an incident automation system (up to 2 hrs)

• Final Stage - Leadership and people management with the Head of Infrastructure / VP of Architecture (60min)

Inclusive Workforce

At Fresha, we are creating a culture where individuals of all backgrounds feel comfortable.

We want all Fresha people to feel included and truly empowered to contribute fully to our vision and goals. Everyone who applies will receive fair consideration for employment.

We do not discriminate based on race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, gender identity, national origin, disability, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics in the location in which the candidate is applying.

If you have any accessibility requirements that would make you more comfortable during the interview process and/or once you join, please let us know so that we can support you.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us