Senior SRE Engineer in Cardiff

hackajob is collaborating with Admiral Group Plc to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of our software systems and infrastructure.

You’ll leverage your engineering expertise to design and deliver resilient platforms, improve observability, automate operations, and guide squads in applying SRE principles effectively.

Working closely with Principal Engineers, Squad Leads, and cross‑functional teams, you’ll embed a culture of continuous improvement, proactive incident management, and operational excellence.

As a senior team member, you will also mentor engineers, contribute to engineering strategy, and help define best practices across the tribe.

Main Duties

Leadership

• Act as a technical lead within your squad, setting high standards for engineering practices and infrastructure resilience.
• Provide mentoring and guidance to junior and mid‑level engineers.
• Collaborate with Principal Engineers and Squad Leads to align engineering work with wider platform goals.
• Help shape and implement the long‑term technical strategy for reliability and scalability.

Implementation & Delivery

• Design and implement scalable, secure, and highly available systems on cloud platforms (Azure/GCP).
• Build and maintain monitoring and alerting solutions to ensure observability and proactive incident response.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipeline design, infrastructure as code, and deployment automation.
• Lead incident management activities, including post‑incident reviews and improvement plans.
• Develop automation and tooling to reduce toil and improve delivery consistency.
• Document technical designs, solutions, and operational procedures to support collaboration and sustainability.

Technical Excellence & Best Practices

• Champion and embed SRE principles, including SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
• Actively contribute to peer reviews and encourage a culture of continuous feedback.
• Drive engineering maturity through shared standards, tooling, and modernisation efforts.
• Raise and track technical debt, driving its resolution across the platform estate.
• Stay up to date with evolving infrastructure, cloud, and DevSecOps practices and recommend relevant innovations.

Collaboration & Communication

• Collaborate with engineers across squads, architecture, security, and platform teams to support shared goals.
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies, ensuring engineering considerations are included in backlog prioritisation and sprint planning.
• Support cross‑functional initiatives including recruitment, onboarding, and guild contributions.

Experience Required

Technical Expertise

• Proven experience supporting and operating scalable frontend systems.
• Strong working knowledge of TypeScript and modern React development practices.
• Experience implementing and supporting observability and monitoring across distributed frontend/backend applications (e.g. using Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Hands‑on experience with containerisation (Docker) and orchestration using Kubernetes (AKS/GKE).
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, particularly for frontend codebases (e.g. Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions).
• Good working knowledge of SQL and interacting with data layers in support of web applications.
• Experience applying SRE principles to frontend and web‑based systems, including SLIs/SLOs, performance budgets, error tracking, and synthetic testing.
• Experience with testing frameworks such as Jest, Vitest, Playwright, and supporting reliable deployments.
• Proficient with version control using GIT and delivery via Agile methodologies.
• Working knowledge of cloud platform services (Azure/GCP) and relevant networking and security configurations for public‑facing apps, including load balancing, CDN, and API gateways.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform and DevSecOps practices is a plus.
• Awareness of Guidewire platforms and digital engagement layers is desirable but not essential.

Who You Are

• An engineering leader with significant experience leading leaders and building engineering capability.
• Comfortable defining and owning strategy within scope and taking responsibility for outcomes.
• Credible and confident working alongside senior technical specialists.
• Skilled at managing complexity, ambiguity and competing priorities.
• Data‑informed, using insight and evidence to drive improvement.
• A role model for engineering professionalism, collaboration and continuous improvement.

Admiral: Where You Can

We take pride in being a diverse and inclusive business. It's a place where you can Be You, and show up as you are. We’re committed to fostering a people‑first culture where everyone is accepted, supported, and empowered to be brilliant. You can, Grow And Progress at a pace and direction that suits you, Make A Difference for our customers and each other, and Share in Our Future with all colleagues eligible for up to £3,600 of free shares each year after one year of service.

Everyone receives 33 days holiday (including bank holidays) when they join us, increasing the longer you stay with us, up to a maximum of 38 days (including bank holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to an additional five days of annual leave.

We’re proud of our people‑first culture. In fact, we've been recognised as a Great Place to Work for Women, a Great Place to Work for Wellbeing, and an overall Great Place to Work for over 25 years! We’re fully committed to making sure your progression is not slowed or halted by barriers related to race, gender, age, sexuality or any of the protected characteristics.

Our fantastic benefits make sure our colleagues have a great work‑life balance; You can view some of our other key benefits here.

Disability Confident Leader

As a Disability Confident Leader, for candidates with a disability or long‑term health condition that opt into the Disability Confident scheme, we’ll invite a fair and proportionate number of applicants that meet the essential requirements of the role to the first stage of our selection process.

If you need any adjustments or support with your application or during the recruitment process, just let us know. Please do email us or contact us on 07386666328. This number is dedicated to supporting candidates that require reasonable adjustments or support during the application process.