Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Principal Site Reliability Engineer [3 days on-site in Manchester]

About Finova 

Finova is the UK's leading lending and savings technology provider, supporting one in every five mortgages nationwide. Our agile, cloud-native solutions enable over 60 banks, building societies, specialist lenders, equity release providers and a network of 2,400+ brokers to stay ahead in a competitive market.

Built on open architecture and backed by deep industry expertise, our platform is designed to scale. Each year, we process over £50 billion in loans, manage nearly £50 billion in savings, and support the digital servicing of more than 650,000 UK borrower accounts.

Be part of a team that’s driving innovation, enabling growth and shaping the future of UK lending.

For Lenders 

Finova offers a flexible, modular technology suite designed to help lenders move faster, scale efficiently and deliver standout digital experiences.

Financial Institutions use Finova to launch products faster, process applications up to 50% more efficiently and reduce operational costs — all while staying fully compliant in a fast-moving market. 

About the Role:

As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will serve as the overarching reliability authority across Finova's entire production estate. Working within a newly established technical function with clear executive backing, you will define how reliability is measured and engineered across both our dedicated client environments and our greenfield GCP platform. Reporting into senior technical leadership, this founding position offers the mandate to shape standards, tooling, and best practices from the ground up, ensuring robust scalability and resilience across our market-leading financial services technology organisation.

About you:

• Extensive background operating as a Principal or Lead SRE, ideally gained within regulated financial services or mission-critical environments where downtime carries significant consequences.

• Expert software engineering authority with hands-on capability in C# and .NET, complemented by scripting proficiency in PowerShell, Python, or Go to build bespoke reliability tooling.

• Deep architectural expertise in Azure or AWS across complex, high-scale production estates, with additional exposure to GCP being highly advantageous.

• Proven track record designing modern, end-to-end observability frameworks from scratch, including integrating telemetry across established, legacy systems.

• Demonstrated capability in driving cultural and operational transformation, successfully embedding proactive reliability engineering practices across an entire organisation.

• Exceptional communication skills, capable of shifting seamlessly from hands-on debugging during production incidents to presenting business-critical reliability investments to the Board.

What will you be doing?

• Defining and establishing clear SLOs and error-budget policies across all Finova products, ensuring reliability directly informs technical prioritisation.

• Directing the technical architecture for instrumentation, telemetry, and alerting across a modern OpenTelemetry-native platform to identify and resolve issues early.

• Spearheading the toil-reduction programme across the estate, identifying operational bottlenecks and permanently engineering them out of day-to-day workflows.

• Partnering with the Platform team to bring every environment, including production, under a unified infrastructure-as-code toolchain to enhance resilience and auditability.

• Leading disaster recovery, failover, and restore-verification strategies to fulfil rigorous contractual obligations for our lending clients while acting as the senior escalation point for critical production incidents.

• Mentoring and growing the internal SRE discipline, actively evangelising reliability best practices across the wider business to ensure prevention remains the standard default.

What We Offer:

• Hybrid working 🕰️
  We operate on a hybrid model that is primarily office-based, requiring three days in the office each week, with the flexibility to work remotely for the remainder.

• Private medical insurance 👩‍⚕️
  Comprehensive health cover, with the option to add your family to your plan, because your well-being matters to us.

• Life assurance & income protection 💰
  We provide life assurance and income protection to give you peace of mind for the future

• Family friendly policies 👶
  Our enhanced family-friendly policy goes beyond maternity and paternity leave, offering paid time off for when plans change or alternative paths to parenthood are needed.

• Work from anywhere 🌴
  Some thrive in the office, others at home — and many do best with choice. With approval, Finova employees can work abroad for up to 4 weeks each year.

• Flexible holiday package 🗓️
  Enjoy 25 days paid holiday allowance, plus all public holidays. And, you can rebook any public holidays for a day that aligns with your personal beliefs or celebration calendar. We also offer holiday trading allowing you to purchase or sell your holiday allowance.

• Company pension scheme 🏦
  With salary exchange, you save on tax and can build a secure future.

• Employee assistance programme 💞
  We understand that mental health is just as important as physical health. Access to a 24/7 confidential counselling helpline ensures you have support when you need it.

• Electric car scheme 🚗
  Get a brand-new electric vehicle with salary sacrifice as a benefit, paid for through your gross monthly pay, saving on Income Tax and National Insurance.

• Health cash plan 🏥
  Our Health Cash Plan empowers you to prioritise your wellbeing by providing effortless reimbursement for everyday healthcare costs, from dental and optical visits to physiotherapy.

• Gym discounts 🏋️
  Achieve your fitness goals for less with GymFlex, which offers significant savings on annual memberships at over 3,000 gyms and leisure centers nationwide.

• Perks that matter 🎁
  We fuel your day with a fully stocked pantry of fresh fruit and snacks and keep the team spirit high with weekly socials and events.

Equal Opportunity Statement

We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. If you’re passionate about this role but don’t meet all the criteria, please reach out, we’d love to discuss how your skills and experiences align with our needs.