Senior Site Reliability Engineer at SixteenFifty, London Area, £475 per day

My client is seeking an experienced Contract Site Reliability Engineer Team Lead to join their team. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring a strong technical background alongside the ability to lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing SRE function. There will be occasional travel to the client's offices in Central London.

This role is paying £475 Per day and is Outside IR35.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for the Site Reliability Engineering function, driving reliability, scalability, and performance improvements across critical production systems.
• Lead, mentor, and coach a team of SREs and engineers, fostering a culture of operational excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Remain hands-on with the design, implementation, and support of cloud infrastructure, automation, observability, and platform reliability initiatives.
• Define, implement, and govern SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, ensuring alignment between engineering priorities and business objectives.
• Architect, maintain, and optimise highly available, distributed systems within an AWS cloud environment.
• Drive change management initiatives across infrastructure, platforms, and operational processes, ensuring smooth adoption of new technologies and ways of working.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation practices, reducing manual operational effort through tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation.
• Collaborate closely with development, platform, and operational teams to embed reliability and resilience best practices throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Lead incident management, root cause analysis, and continuous service improvement activities.
• Establish and enhance monitoring, alerting, and observability capabilities across the technology estate.

Required Skills & Experience

• Proven experience in a Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Cloud Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering role, with experience leading or mentoring technical teams.
• Demonstrable hands-on technical expertise alongside leadership responsibilities.
• Strong experience delivering and managing change within complex technology environments.
• Extensive experience working with AWS cloud services and architectures, as the client's platform is hosted within AWS.
• Strong Linux/Unix systems administration knowledge.
• Proficiency in one or more scripting or programming languages such as Python, Bash, Go, or Java.
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code tools, including Terraform and/or CloudFormation.
• Experience with containerisation and orchestration technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps.
• Essential experience with observability and monitoring platforms, including Datadog and Splunk.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, security principles, and cloud-native architectures.
• Excellent troubleshooting, problem-solving, and stakeholder management skills.

Desirable

• Experience operating within large-scale, mission-critical production environments.
• Previous experience establishing or maturing SRE practices and operating models.
• Relevant AWS, Kubernetes, or cloud certifications.

Please apply for immediate consideration.