Senior Site Reliability Engineer

GCS Recruitment; Ireland; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

GCS Recruitment is seeking a Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer to drive reliability, observability, and production excellence across critical platforms. You will lead SRE governance, champion automation, and ensure services remain scalable and resilient.

In this role you will own SLOs/SLIs, lead incident response, and mentor engineers while partnering with stakeholders to optimize cost and performance. Ireland-based role with hands-on leadership responsibilities.

Qualifications

• Experience in a dedicated SRE or reliability-focused role.
• Strong understanding of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Hands-on with observability tools and cloud platforms.
• Proven ability to automate and build runbooks.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive service reliability objectives and governance.
• Design end-to-end observability across apps and infra.
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews.
• Develop automation to reduce toil and improve efficiency.
• Promote reliability standards across teams and vendors.
• Collaborate with FinOps to balance cost and performance.
• Mentor engineers and present reliability metrics to leadership.

Skills

Site Reliability Engineering

SLOs SLIs Error Budgets

Observability Monitoring

Cloud Platforms Azure AWS

Automation Scripting

Incident Management

Stakeholder Management

Job description

About the Role

Client is seeking a highly skilled Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to drive reliability, observability, and production excellence across critical business platforms. This role combines hands-on engineering expertise with leadership and governance responsibilities, ensuring services remain scalable, resilient, and aligned with business objectives.

As a key member of the technology team, you will champion SRE best practices, improve operational efficiency through automation, enhance observability, and lead the organization's approach to service reliability and incident management.

Key Responsibilities

Reliability Engineering & Production Excellence

• Define, implement, and manage Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budgets.
• Drive data-led decisions balancing feature delivery with reliability goals.
• Establish and enforce production readiness and operational excellence standards.

Observability & Monitoring

• Design and implement end-to-end observability across applications and infrastructure.
• Leverage tools such as Datadog, Azure Monitor, OpenTelemetry, and related platforms.
• Translate monitoring and telemetry data into actionable insights that improve system performance and reliability.

Incident Management & Continuous Improvement

• Lead the response to major incidents and critical outages.
• Facilitate post-incident reviews and ensure remediation actions are completed.
• Implement structured processes to reduce MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) and improve service recovery.

Automation & Toil Reduction

• Develop automation solutions, operational tooling, and runbooks.
• Build self-healing and auto-remediation capabilities.
• Integrate automation into monitoring and alerting workflows.

Governance & Standards

• Define and promote reliability engineering standards across internal and vendor teams.
• Assess production risks and make release readiness recommendations.
• Ensure consistency in operational practices across multiple teams and stakeholders.

FinOps & Cloud Optimization

• Collaborate with engineering and FinOps teams to balance reliability, performance, and cost.
• Monitor and optimize cloud resource utilization while maintaining service quality.

Leadership & Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as an SRE champion across the organization.
• Mentor engineers and influence teams to adopt reliability best practices.
• Present reliability metrics, risks, and strategic recommendations to senior stakeholders.

Required Skills & Experience

• Extensive experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or a similar reliability-focused role.
• Strong understanding of SLOs, SLIs, Error Budgets, and Production Readiness practices.
• Hands-on experience with Azure, AWS, or other cloud platforms.
• Proven expertise in:
• Observability and monitoring solutions
• Incident management and service restoration
• Automation, scripting, and operational toolingReliability engineering practices
• Experience with tools such as Datadog, Azure Monitor, OpenTelemetry, or comparable platforms.
• Strong understanding of DevOps, SRE, and traditional Operations models.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.