Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Defence in Cheltenham

At IBM CIC, we deliver deep technical and industry expertise to a wide range of public and private sector clients in the UK. A career in IBM CIC means you’ll have the opportunity to work with visionaries across multiple industries to improve the hybrid cloud and AI journey for the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Your ability to accelerate impact and make meaningful change for your clients is enabled by our strategic partner ecosystem and our robust technology platforms across the IBM portfolio. Curiosity and a constant quest for knowledge serve as the foundation to success here. You’ll be encouraged to challenge the norm, investigate ideas outside of your role, and come up with creative solutions which impact a wide network of clients, whom may be at their site or one of our CIC or IBM locations. Our culture of evolution centres on long‑term career growth and development opportunities in an environment that embraces your unique skills and experience.

We Offer

• Many training opportunities from classroom to e‑learning, mentoring and coaching programs and the chance to gain industry recognised certifications
• Regular and frequent promotion opportunities to ensure you can drive and develop your career with us
• Feedback and checkpoints throughout the year
• Diversity & Inclusion as an essential and authentic component of our culture through our policies and process as well as our Employee Champion teams and support networks
• A culture where your ideas for growth and innovation are always welcome
• Internal recognition programs for peer‑to‑peer appreciation as well as from manager to employees
• Tools and policies to support your work‑life balance from flexible working approaches, sabbatical programmes, paid paternity leave, maternity leave and an innovative maternity returners scheme
• More traditional benefits, such as 25 days holiday (in addition to public holidays), online shopping discounts, an Employee Assistance Program, a group personal pension plan of an additional 5% of your base salary paid by us monthly to save for your future

Your Role And Responsibilities

We are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to play a key role in strengthening IBM’s reliability engineering and DevOps capabilities across public‑sector and defence programmes. In this role, you will lead smaller delivery projects, mentor junior engineers, and help define the technical direction for our SRE and DevOps practices. You will work across the full service lifecycle, focusing on automation, reliability, observability, and secure delivery. This position offers the opportunity to contribute to the stability and resilience of mission‑critical systems used by UK government and defence organisations. Working within IBM’s multidisciplinary delivery teams, you will apply disciplined engineering methods, high‑assurance security approaches, and modern SRE practices to ensure that the systems we support are dependable, scalable, and compliant with public‑sector standards.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and efficient cloud‑based systems and applications for public‑sector and defence environments.
• Provide expert‑level guidance on SRE and DevOps tools, technologies, and best practices across IBM delivery teams.
• Work directly with government and defence clients to understand their operational needs, translating them into reliable technical solutions.
• Stay up to date with emerging SRE and DevOps trends to ensure IBM continues to deliver modern, efficient, and secure engineering solutions.
• Use infrastructure‑as‑code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation to automate and standardise infrastructure deployments.
• Configure and maintain monitoring and alerting platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Nagios to ensure strong system observability and reliability.
• Manage log aggregation and analysis tools such as the ELK Stack or Splunk, supporting visibility and auditability in secure environments.
• Apply robust security best practices throughout the engineering lifecycle, aligned with DevOps principles and the stringent requirements of government and defence systems.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate software delivery and improve deployment speed, quality, and consistency.

Preferred Education

Bachelor’s Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• A passion for SRE & DevOps & a desire to learn & grow in this field
• Strong design analytical & problem‑solving skills & attention to detail
• Excellent communication & collaboration skills
• Experience with cloud platforms, containerisation & CI/CD pipelines
• Strong understanding of system design scalability & reliability
• Ability to work independently & with a team

As an equal opportunities’ employer, we welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds. However, for you to be eligible for this role, you must have the valid right to work in the UK. Unfortunately, we do not offer visa sponsorship and have no future plans to do so. You must be a resident in the UK and have been living continuously in the UK for the last 10 years. You must be able to hold or gain a UK government security clearance.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Experience with CI/CD tools, such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, or CircleCI, with the ability to design and optimise automated build and deployment pipelines.
• Familiarity with configuration management tools, including Ansible, Puppet, or Chef, for managing consistent and repeatable infrastructure.
• Strong knowledge of infrastructure‑as‑code tools, such as Terraform or CloudFormation, for provisioning and managing cloud resources.
• Experience using monitoring and logging platforms like Prometheus, ELK Stack, or Datadog to support observability, alerting, and troubleshooting.
• A genuine passion for continuous learning, staying current with SRE and DevOps practices, and ongoing professional development.

Desirable Certifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
• Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate
• Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
• Google Professional Cloud Engineer
• HashiCorp Terraform Associate
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

Seniority level Mid‑Senior level

Employment type Full‑time

Job function Engineering and Information Technology

Industries IT Services and IT Consulting