Principle/Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Principal/Lead Site Reliability Engineer x2

Fully remote | Permanent | £120,000+ basic salary, plus bonus and benefits

Visa sponsorship is not available for these positions.

The opportunity

We’re supporting a global payments technology business building a new SRE function. They’re hiring two Principal SREs to shape its approach to reliability and build the software, tooling and automation that make it work.

This is primarily a coding role. You’ll stay hands-on in development and design while setting standards, influencing engineering teams and leading major incidents. The environment spans company-operated data centres, public cloud, internal platforms and customer-facing applications.

What you’ll be doing

• Write production-quality software to improve reliability, automate operational work and build self-service tools.
• Define reliability standards and non-functional requirements, with automated checks that identify risks early.
• Work with service owners to establish SLIs, SLOs and error budgets, using them to guide release decisions.
• Improve observability across logs, metrics and traces, with actionable alerts and clear runbooks.
• Lead major incidents spanning multiple teams and run blameless reviews that deliver lasting improvements.
• Build failure testing into delivery processes and test disaster recovery against agreed recovery objectives.
• Help teams improve capacity, performance and resilience through safe design and release practices.
• Use AI coding agents daily and build integrations that allow engineers and agents to investigate issues and perform approved actions safely.
• Lead design and code reviews, mentor senior engineers and help other teams adopt agreed standards.
• Help consolidate and retire legacy tooling and systems.

What we’re looking for

• Substantial experience in SRE, production engineering or software engineering, supporting large-scale production services.
• Strong, current programming ability in at least one of Go, Rust, C#, Java or Python, with examples of software you’ve personally built, tested and maintained.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, policy as code, CI/CD and safe deployment practices.
• Practical ownership of SLOs, error budgets, incident command and post-incident reviews.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure patterns, including timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, graceful degradation and cascading failures.
• Solid Linux, virtualisation and networking fundamentals, alongside public cloud experience.
• Experience influencing teams you don’t directly manage and turning standards into adopted engineering practices.
• Daily use of AI development tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, with examples of work delivered using them.
• Understanding of MCP integrations, reusable agent skills and repository guidance, including permissions, verification and protecting sensitive data.

Useful additional experience

• Payments, PCI DSS or other regulated environments.
• Grafana, Splunk and OpenTelemetry.
• Nomad, Consul, Vault and HAProxy.
• VMware vSphere and vSAN.
• Cloudflare, Palo Alto, GitHub Actions or Spacelift.
• Capacity planning, load testing and controlled chaos engineering.

Working arrangements and package

• Fully remote, working with teams across multiple locations and time zones.
• Basic salary from £120,000, plus bonus and benefits.
• On-call responsibility for SRE-owned tooling and services, command of major incidents spanning teams, and occasional planned out-of-hours changes. Final arrangements are being defined as the team develops.
• No visa sponsorship is available; applicants must have the right to work in the UK without employer sponsorship.