The Core Engineering - Site Reliability Engineering - Associate - Birmingham

Goldman Sachs Bank AG; Birmingham; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Goldman Sachs is seeking an Associate Site Reliability Engineer in Birmingham. You will join Core Engineering to build, run, and scale high-performing, fault-tolerant systems and automate operations to reduce toil.

The role emphasizes observability, reliability, and collaboration with software teams. Responsibilities include proactive production health monitoring, capacity planning, incident management, and developing self-healing capabilities.

Qualifications

• 3–4 years of professional software, systems, production, or SRE experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS, Engineering, or related technical field.
• Experience with one or more programming or scripting languages (Java, Python, or Perl).
• Ability to debug, optimize, and automate software and operational workflows in production.

Responsibilities

• Proactively manage production services by measuring availability, capacity, latency, and health.
• Shape software before go-live through system design reviews and capacity planning.
• Scale systems by improving reliability, capacity, performance, and resilience.
• Practice incident management with clear escalation and blameless postmortems.
• Identify and implement improvements to observability and monitoring tools.
• Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for reliability.
• Engineer automation and self-healing capabilities to reduce toil.

Skills

Software engineering

Systems engineering

Automation

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK

OpenTelemetry

Job description

The Core Engineering - Site Reliability Engineering - Associate - Birmingham location_on Birmingham, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom

What We Do

Core Engineering is a global team of more than 2,500 engineers and scientists focused on solving complex, mission-critical problems across the firm. We build and operate platforms and applications that produce metrics, analyze risk, curate financial reports, enable people processes, support budgeting and financial planning, and help detect and mitigate regulatory and reputational risk. Our teams work with modern engineering frameworks, large-scale structured and unstructured data, responsive front-end applications, and big data technologies. The firm is also making a significant investment to uplift and rebuild core applications on cloud platforms.

Site Reliability Engineering at Goldman Sachs combines software engineering and systems engineering to build, run, and maintain high-performing, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. As a site reliability engineer, you will play a mission-critical role in ensuring that our systems are healthy, observable, automated, and designed to scale. You will collaborate with engineering teams to improve production services, enable faster delivery of new capabilities, reduce downtime, and eliminate repetitive operational work through automation. This role sits within Core Engineering and applies SRE practices to services that support compliance, risk, and other critical business functions.

Responsibilities

• Proactively manage production services by measuring and monitoring availability, capacity, latency, and overall system health.
• Shape software before go-live through system design consulting, capacity planning, operational readiness reviews, and launch reviews.
• Scale and evolve systems by driving changes that improve reliability, capacity, performance, and operational resilience.
• Practice sustainable incident management through clear escalation, effective remediation, and a blameless postmortem culture.
• Identify and implement improvements to system behavior, controls, observability, and monitoring tools.
• Define and maintain service level indicators (SLIs), service level objectives (SLOs), and error budgets to quantify and manage service reliability.
• Engineer automation and self-healing capabilities to reduce toil and improve operational efficiency.

What We Are Looking For

Required Qualifications

• 3–4 years of professional software engineering, systems engineering, production engineering, or site reliability engineering experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field involving programming, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with one or more programming or scripting languages, such as Java, Python, or Perl.
• Ability to debug, optimize, and automate software and operational workflows in production environments.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a systematic approach to identifying risk, diagnosing issues, and driving resolution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with automated testing, software development lifecycle concepts, and developing applications in a Linux environment.
• Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, software design, and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience with observability platforms, including distributed tracing, logging, metrics, and tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with site reliability engineering practices, relational databases, Hadoop, big data technologies, or cloud-native services.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architecture and managed services across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
• Knowledge of financial services, compliance, risk, or regulated technology environments.

Interpersonal Skills

• Passion for solving operational problems and continuously improving systems through automation.
• Highly motivated, proactive, and able to work effectively under pressure without compromising engineering quality or control discipline.
• Strong communicator and committed team player who can take direction, contribute constructively to design discussions, and influence improvements to production services.
• Ability to multitask and remain effective in a fast-paced, collaborative engineering environment.
• Interest in financial markets, technology, and continuous learning.

ABOUT GOLDMAN SACHS

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of financial services to a substantial and diversified client base that includes corporations, financial institutions, governments and individuals. Founded in 1869, the firm is headquartered in New York and maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world.

At Goldman Sachs, we commit our people, capital and ideas to help our clients, shareholders and the communities we serve to grow. Founded in 1869, we are a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm. Headquartered in New York, we maintain offices around the world.

We believe who you are makes you better at what you do. We're committed to fostering and advancing diversity and inclusion in our own workplace and beyond by ensuring every individual within our firm has a number of opportunities to grow professionally and personally, from our training and development opportunities and firmwide networks to benefits, wellness and personal finance offerings and mindfulness programs. Learn more about our culture, benefits, and people at GS.com/careers.

We’re committed to finding reasonable accommodations for candidates with special needs or disabilities during our recruiting process. Learn more: https://www.goldmansachs.com/careers/footer/disability-statement.html

Goldman Sachs is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, veterans status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Healthcare & Medical Insurance

We offer a wide range of health and welfare programs that vary depending on office location. These generally include medical, dental, short-term disability, long-term disability, life, accidental death, labor accident and business travel accident insurance.

We offer competitive vacation policies based on employee level and office location. We promote time off from work to recharge by providing generous vacation entitlements and a minimum of three weeks expected vacation usage each year.

Financial Wellness & Retirement

We assist employees in saving and planning for retirement, offer financial support for higher education, and provide a number of benefits to help employees prepare for the unexpected. We offer live financial education and content on a variety of topics to address the spectrum of employees’ priorities.

Health Services

We offer a medical advocacy service for employees and family members facing critical health situations, and counseling and referral services through the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). We provide Global Medical, Security and Travel Assistance and a Workplace Ergonomics Program. We also offer state-of-the-art on-site health centers in certain offices.

Fitness

To encourage employees to live a healthy and active lifestyle, some of our offices feature on-site fitness centers. For eligible employees we typically reimburse fees paid for a fitness club membership or activity (up to a pre-approved amount).

Child Care & Family Care

We offer on-site child care centers that provide full-time and emergency back-up care, as well as mother and baby rooms and homework rooms. In every office, we provide advice and counseling services, expectant parent resources and transitional programs for parents returning from parental leave. Adoption, surrogacy, egg donation and egg retrieval stipends are also available.

Benefits at Goldman Sachs

Read more about the full suite of class-leading benefits our firm has to offer.