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
Principal Site Reliability Engineer Engineering and security · Manchester · employer: Finova
Finova is an exceptional employer that prioritises employee well-being and professional growth, offering a hybrid working model in the vibrant city of London. With comprehensive benefits such as private medical insurance, flexible holiday packages, and a supportive work culture that encourages innovation and collaboration, employees are empowered to thrive both personally and professionally. The company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, along with opportunities for skill development in the fast-paced FinTech sector, makes it an attractive place for those seeking meaningful and rewarding careers.
