Sre Staff Engineer

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The SRE Staff Engineer will lead the adoption of Site Reliability Engineering across SMA, enabling teams to move from traditional platform management towards a proactive, engineering-led approach to reliability, resilience and platform quality.
The role has overall accountability for the operational health and reliability of the SMA platform estate, ensuring platforms operate correctly, meet agreed Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and maintain appropriate standards of resilience, supportability and technical quality. This includes driving the management of technical debt, lifecycle risks and reliability improvements across enterprise-scale SaaS, on-premises, cloud and hybrid platforms.
As an SRE evangelist and technical leader, the role will establish direction, influence engineering practices and bring teams on the SRE journey. Working closely with the DevOps Engineering Manager, development teams and data teams, it will ensure the wider SMA organisation delivers customer expectations through consistent platform quality and resilient services.
The role will line manage the Operations Manager and four DevOps-focused engineers. It retains overall accountability for platform incident management, while delegating operational coordination and response activities appropriately. Targeted hands-on contribution will support complex problem-solving and demonstrate engineering approaches, rather than being the role's primary focus.
What you'll do

SRE leadership and adoption

Set the SRE direction and roadmap across SMA, evolving platform management into sustainable reliability engineering.
Champion SRE principles through practical guidance, coaching and measurable improvements.
Build shared ownership of reliability across platform, DevOps, development and data teams.
Establish consistent SRE practices across SaaS, on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments.

Platform health, resilience and quality

Maintain accountability for the reliability, resilience and technical quality of SMA platforms.
Provide a consistent view of platform health, operational risks, dependencies and improvement priorities.
Ensure technical debt, lifecycle risks, capacity constraints and resilience gaps are identified and addressed.
Set standards for observability, recovery, supportability and production readiness.

SLOs and reliability governance

Define meaningful SLOs, SLIs and error budgets with platform owners and engineering teams.
Ensure teams monitor service health, understand SLO risks and implement corrective improvements.
Lead reliability reviews to inform engineering priorities.
Balance customer expectations, delivery commitments and operational risk.

Incident and operational leadership

Own overall accountability for incident management, service restoration and corrective actions.
Delegate operational response to the Operations Manager and technical leads while maintaining oversight.
Lead technical oversight of significant incidents and ensure clear escalation and ownership.
Use blameless incident reviews to prevent recurrence and address underlying technical debt.

Engineering enablement and people leadership

Line manage the Operations Manager and four DevOps engineers, providing direction, coaching and development.
Strengthen SRE capability through mentoring, technical guidance and knowledge sharing.
Improve collaboration, handovers and platform support knowledge across teams.
Enable teams to own operational improvements and routine technical decisions.

Cross-team delivery and collaboration

Partner with the DevOps Engineering Manager, development and data teams to align reliability priorities and engineering capacity.
Embed reliability and supportability into platform design, delivery and operational acceptance.
Establish clear responsibilities and shared outcomes across engineering and operations.
Ensure reliability improvements are prioritised alongside new capabilities and platform delivery.

Who you are

Bachelor/Master's Degree in Computer Science or relate field;
Previous experience working in an SRE role, with a strong grounding in DevOps and platform operations;
Experience leading reliability and operations in a complex, enterprise-scale, multi-platform environment;
Experience supporting a mixed estate of SaaS, on-premises, cloud and hybrid platforms;
Demonstrable experienc