Vice President - Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) - The Core Engineering - Birmingham

Goldman Sachs; West Midlands; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Goldman Sachs is seeking a Vice President of Site Reliability Engineering to lead the design and operation of highly available, observable, and resilient platforms at scale. You will partner with engineering leaders to define SLOs/SLIs, drive automation, and reduce toil across multiple teams.

Ideal candidates bring 7–10 years of backend/ops experience, strong IaC and cloud expertise (AWS/GCP/Azure), and a proven track record in distributed systems, incident response, and blameless post-mortems

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or related technical field.
• 7 to 10 years of experience in site reliability, DevOps, or distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Establish SLOs/SLIs and error budgets with engineering leadership.
• Architect highly available, fault-tolerant, self-healing systems.
• Reduce toil by building automation and self-service tooling.
• Improve production readiness via load testing and capacity forecasting.
• Lead incident response with blameless post-mortems and root-cause analysis.
• Promote healthy on-call models and clear escalation paths.

Skills

Programming languages

IaC

Docker & Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Observability

Linux & SDLC

Networking & load balancing

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

CloudFormation

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

ELK

CloudWatch

Job description

WHAT WE DO

Site Reliability Engineering at Goldman Sachs sits at the intersection of software engineering, systems design, and production excellence. In this VP role, you will help engineer highly reliable, observable, and resilient platforms that support critical business services at scale. You will collaborate with multiple engineering teams to continually improve our production system architecture, facilitate fast delivery of new services, and reduce downtime.

Job Description

WHAT WE DO

Site Reliability Engineering at Goldman Sachs sits at the intersection of software engineering, systems design, and production excellence. In this VP role, you will help engineer highly reliable, observable, and resilient platforms that support critical business services at scale. You will collaborate with multiple engineering teams to continually improve our production system architecture, facilitate fast delivery of new services, and reduce downtime.

This role is for software engineers who enjoy solving complex distributed system problems, building tools and platforms that make teams more effective, and championing SRE principles (such as SLOs, error budgets, and blameless post-mortems) across a large engineering organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with engineering leadership to establish service level objectives (SLOs), service level indicators (SLIs), and error budgets.
• Collaborate with product developers to architect highly available, fault-tolerant, and self-healing systems. Conduct architectural reviews and introduce patterns like circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and rate limiting.
• Reduce operational toil by building automation, tooling, and self-service capabilities that remove repetitive manual work.
• Improve production readiness through load testing, performance tuning, capacity forecasting, chaos engineering and reliability reviews.
• Lead the response to complex, multi-system production incidents. Facilitate blameless post-mortems to identify root causes and drive long-term preventative actions.
• Promote sustainable operations by helping design healthy on-call models, clear escalation paths, and balanced pager responsibilities.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Core Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Java, Python, or Node.js) with a focus on writing clean, maintainable code for tooling and automation.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation.
• Deep understanding of containerization and orchestration technologies, specifically Docker and Kubernetes (K8s), including service meshes and ingress controllers.
• Advanced experience with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure), specifically building and operating highly resilient cloud-native architectures.
• Proficiency with Observability stacks, including distributed tracing, logging, and metrics (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or CloudWatch)
• Experience with automated testing and SDLC concepts, developing applications in a Linux environment, and sound knowledge of algorithms, data structures and software design.
• Knowledge of networking protocols(VPC) , load balancing strategies in a distributed systems environment , database query performance tuning and identify cause for lagging

Core Competencies & Soft Skills

• Ability to analyze complex, distributed systems holistically and understand how individual components interact under load.
• Strong interpersonal skills to collaborate with product developers, influence architectural decisions, prioritize toil reduction, and drive SRE adoption without direct authority.
• Ability to translate complex technical issues into clear, actionable insights for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Highly motivated, pro-active and capable of multi-tasking under pressure in a fast-paced environment without compromising quality.
• Commitment to fostering a blameless culture where failures are treated as opportunities to learn and improve systems.
• Interest in financial markets and technology.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, System Engineering, or a related technical field that involves programming.
• 7 to 10 years of experience

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

© The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., 2026. All rights reserved.

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.