At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead a team to design and improve reliable, scalable platform services for critical digital products.
- Company: Join the Department for Business and Trade, focused on growing the economy and supporting businesses.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, inclusive culture, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Dynamic role with a focus on collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.
- Why this job: Make a real impact by enhancing digital services that support businesses across the UK.
- Qualifications: Experience in leading teams, cloud platforms, and modern DevOps/SRE practices required.
The predicted salary is between 60000 - 80000 £ per year.
Location: Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Salford
About The Job
The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission - to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways:
- We help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.
- We open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.
- We work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advice, finance and deal‑making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.
The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission.
About The Role
As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer Manager, you will lead the design, delivery and continuous improvement of reliable, scalable and secure platform services that underpin critical DBT digital products. Working closely with multidisciplinary, agile teams, you’ll ensure development teams have the tools and support they need from observability and monitoring through to CI/CD pipelines, so services are resilient, performant and centred around user needs.
You’ll champion good engineering practices, helping teams adopt service‑level thinking using metrics, service‑level indicators (SLIs), objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to support informed, collaborative decision making. This is a people‑focused leadership role where you will create an environment in which engineers can do their best work. You will line manage and develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers, supporting their growth and wellbeing, while also acting as a senior technical leader across the wider DDaT community.
You’ll work in partnership with product managers, architects and delivery colleagues to shape platform strategy, improve reliability and reduce operational burden. Alongside hands‑on engineering, you will help build and scale our global platform, support live services through an on‑call rota, and lead improvements such as enhancing observability and streamlining deployment processes to improve service quality and delivery outcomes.
Job Description
- Lead and support a team of Site Reliability Engineers, setting clear direction while fostering an inclusive, collaborative and high‑performing team culture.
- Build strong working relationships with product, delivery and architecture colleagues to ensure platform services meet business and user needs.
- Provide technical leadership across DevOps/SRE practices, guiding teams to adopt approaches that support reliability, sustainability and continuous improvement.
- Coach, mentor and support engineers across DDaT, contributing to a supportive and diverse engineering community.
- Design, build and maintain reliable, secure and scalable cloud‑based infrastructure using infrastructure‑as‑code approaches.
- Enable teams to develop effective observability practices, including monitoring, logging, metrics and alerting that support proactive service management.
- Work with teams to define and embed Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets in a pragmatic and user‑focused way.
- Support the development and continual improvement of CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, frequent and low‑risk delivery of changes.
- Oversee live service reliability, supporting teams through incident and problem management while encouraging a learning‑focused, blameless culture.
- Ensure security, resilience and compliance considerations are understood and embedded into engineering practices.
Technology
- AWS and Azure
- GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline / CodeBuild
- Terraform
- Docker, Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
- ElasticSearch / OpenSearch
- Python and Django framework
- PostgreSQL as a service (Amazon RDS)
- Datadog, Logstash
- Redis / Elasticache
Person Specification
- Experience leading, supporting and developing engineers, including line management or strong mentoring experience.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly and build effective relationships with a range of stakeholders.
- Experience of working with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, applying modern DevOps and SRE practices.
- Experience designing and delivering infrastructure‑as‑code solutions using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation or similar.
- Ability to write clean, maintainable and well‑tested code in at least one programming language.
- Experience designing, operating and improving distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user impact.
