SRE Tech Lead

Arbor Education; United States; Remote; GBP 80,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly working

Wellbeing & mental health support

Private dental insurance

Pension

Flexible working

Job summary

Arbor Education is seeking an experienced Site Reliability Technical Lead to own system design, reliability, and security for our remote product suite used by thousands of schools. You will mentor engineers, drive automation, and set standards across teams.

The role emphasizes architectural leadership, incident management, and collaboration with product and engineering managers. Remote work is supported with a competitive salary.

Qualifications

• Experience: Extensive professional experience in SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering on complex, scalable systems.
• Cloud Systems: Extensive expertise with AWS and distributed cloud architectures.
• Platform Scale: Proven experience operating platforms serving a high volume of requests (1000 req/sec).
• Infrastructure as Code: Proficiency with Terraform and configuration management tools.
• Programming: Strong skills in Python, Go, or similar languages for automation.
• Observability: Deep experience with monitoring/observability platforms (DataDog, Prometheus) and incident management.
• System Design: Expertise in distributed systems, microservices, and resilience patterns.
• Containerisation: Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, ECS.
• CI/CD: Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments.
• Leadership: Ability to mentor and support growth of engineers.

Responsibilities

• Architectural Leadership: Define and guide system architecture balancing speed, scalability, maintainability, and security.
• Reliability and Performance: Ensure systems are observable and meet SLOs; drive reliability improvements.
• Incident Management: Lead RCA and optimize incident response processes.
• Automation: Drive automation initiatives to reduce toil and improve efficiency.
• Technical Standards: Uphold coding standards and promote automated testing.
• Planning and Delivery: Lead estimation, feasibility, release planning, and post-release reviews.
• Mentorship and Coaching: Mentor engineers and align with product strategy.
• Collaboration: Communicate technical direction with product managers and other engineers.

Skills

SRE/DevOps

Platform Engineering

AWS

Python/Go

Observability

Containerization

CI/CD

Leadership

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

ECS

DataDog

Prometheus

Job description

At Arbor, we're on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better.

We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn't mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day.

Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 7,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.

At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren't just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

About the role

We are looking for an experienced and collaborative Site Reliability Technical Lead to join our Site Reliability team and take ownership of system and solution design to ensure our products are robust, scalable, and secure. The remit and focus of the role is to blend deep technical expertise with leadership, requiring you to mentor and coach engineers, embed a culture of quality and reliability, and guide the team in making sound technical decisions. It's a broad and exciting role, so we're looking for someone up for a challenge - if you're highly technical and a good communicator, this is the role for you.

• Architectural Leadership: Define and guide system architecture, balancing trade-offs between speed, scalability, maintainability, and security to meet business goals
• Reliability and Performance: Champion accountability from design through to production by ensuring systems are observable and meet agreed Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Drive continuous improvement in platform reliability, performance, and efficiency
• Incident Management: Lead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) when issues occur and contribute to optimizing the incident response process and framework
• Automation: Drive automation initiatives across the team to reduce operational toil and improve system efficiency
• Technical Standards: Uphold coding standards, promote automated testing, and work with the architecture community to drive technology adoption and share best practices across teams. Ensure production readiness standards for all services
• Planning and Delivery: Lead technical estimation and feasibility assessments, ensuring plans are realistic and aligned with team capacity. Contribute to structured release planning and support post-release reviews
• Mentorship and Coaching: Mentor and coach engineers through constructive feedback, knowledge sharing, and motivation. Foster alignment and help the team galvanise around technical solutions and goals
• Collaboration: Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and other engineers to align technical direction with product strategy. Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Location: Remote

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

About us

At Arbor, we're on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better.

We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn't mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day.

Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 7,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.

At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren't just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

About the role

We are looking for an experienced and collaborative Site Reliability Technical Lead to join our Site Reliability team and take ownership of system and solution design to ensure our products are robust, scalable, and secure. The remit and focus of the role is to blend deep technical expertise with leadership, requiring you to mentor and coach engineers, embed a culture of quality and reliability, and guide the team in making sound technical decisions. It's a broad and exciting role, so we're looking for someone up for a challenge - if you're highly technical and a good communicator, this is the role for you.

• Architectural Leadership: Define and guide system architecture, balancing trade-offs between speed, scalability, maintainability, and security to meet business goals
• Reliability and Performance: Champion accountability from design through to production by ensuring systems are observable and meet agreed Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Drive continuous improvement in platform reliability, performance, and efficiency
• Incident Management: Lead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) when issues occur and contribute to optimizing the incident response process and framework
• Automation: Drive automation initiatives across the team to reduce operational toil and improve system efficiency
• Technical Standards: Uphold coding standards, promote automated testing, and work with the architecture community to drive technology adoption and share best practices across teams. Ensure production readiness standards for all services
• Planning and Delivery: Lead technical estimation and feasibility assessments, ensuring plans are realistic and aligned with team capacity. Contribute to structured release planning and support post-release reviews
• Mentorship and Coaching: Mentor and coach engineers through constructive feedback, knowledge sharing, and motivation. Foster alignment and help the team galvanise around technical solutions and goals
• Collaboration: Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and other engineers to align technical direction with product strategy. Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Requirements

About you

• Experience: Extensive professional experience in SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering on complex, scalable systems
• Cloud Systems: Extensive expertise with AWS and distributed cloud architectures
• Platform Scale: Proven experience operating platforms serving a high volume of requests (:1000 req/sec)
• Infrastructure as Code: Advanced proficiency with Terraform and configuration management tools
• Programming: Strong skills in Python, Go, or a similar language for automation and tooling
• Observability: Deep experience with monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., DataDog, Prometheus, or equivalent), plus incident/problem management
• System Design: Expert understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and resilience patterns
• Containerisation: Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS)
• CI/CD: Practical experience with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability in mentoring and supporting the growth of fellow engineers

Bonus Skills

• Experience with chaos engineering and reliability testing
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance frameworks
• Background in agile and lean methodologies (Scrum/Kanban)
• Contributions to open-source projects or the SRE community

Benefits

What we offer

The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you'll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching)
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
• Dog friendly offices!

Interview process

• Phone screen
• 1st stage
• 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at [e-mail].

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice.

Arbor Education is an equal opportunities organisation

Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively encourage applications from people of all backgrounds.

Refer a friend

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: [e-mail]

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.