Senior Site Reliability Engineer in Leeds

The Senior Site Reliability Engineer is a key technical leadership role at the intersection of infrastructure, platform engineering, operational resilience, and developer enablement. At Partnerize, we operate a high‑scale platform processing over a billion daily events across a hybrid estate spanning on‑prem datacentres and AWS cloud infrastructure. You will play a critical role in ensuring our systems remain reliable, scalable, secure, and operationally efficient whilst helping evolve our engineering culture towards a modern “you build it, you own it” model.

This is not a purely operational support role. We are looking for an experienced technical leader and subject matter expert who can balance hands‑on engineering with strategic thinking – someone capable of modernising legacy systems, improving observability and automation, and guiding engineers through increasingly complex distributed environments.

The Things You Care About

At the heart of our platform, we process and distribute performance marketing data at enormous scale, generating over a billion events across our infrastructure daily. Our systems power real‑time decision making, partner attribution, analytics, and customer‑facing products that require high availability and operational excellence. As we continue to scale globally, we are evolving our infrastructure, modernising legacy systems, and investing heavily in automation, containerisation, observability, and platform reliability. We deploy to production multiple times a day and operate a hybrid environment spanning physical datacentres and AWS cloud services.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Partnerize, You Will:

• Lead Reliability & Operations – Take ownership of platform reliability, availability, and operational performance across a complex hybrid estate supporting Partnerize, BrandVerity, Ascend, and Konnecto.
• Drive Platform Modernisation – Help lead the transition from legacy operational models towards modern containerised infrastructure and self‑service engineering platforms.
• Champion DevOps Enablement – Empower development teams through automation, tooling, and platform improvements that support a “you build it, you own it” engineering culture.
• Act as a Technical Authority – Provide technical leadership and guidance across infrastructure, distributed systems, security, observability, and operational best practices.
• Improve Security & Resilience – Partner closely with security and compliance teams to strengthen platform security posture, conduct threat modelling, vulnerability assessments, and support secure‑by‑design engineering practices.
• Mentor & Develop Engineers – Act as a player‑coach within the SRE organisation, mentoring engineers, supporting technical growth, and helping shape future technical leaders.
• Lead Incident Management – Take ownership during major incidents, driving clear communication, structured troubleshooting, and pragmatic resolution strategies across the wider business.
• Drive Automation & Continuous Improvement – Continuously improve infrastructure, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and operational tooling to improve reliability, scalability, and delivery velocity.

You are an experienced Site Reliability Engineer with:

• Deep Technical Expertise – Strong experience operating and supporting distributed systems at scale across Linux, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure environments.
• Platform Engineering Experience – Hands‑on expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation.
• Strong Systems Thinking – The ability to troubleshoot complex systems methodically, balancing operational stability with long‑term architectural improvements.
• Security & Operational Awareness – Experience applying security principles within DevOps and distributed systems environments, including threat modelling, vulnerability assessment, and operational risk management.
• Pragmatic Problem Solving – Confidence moving between strategic platform initiatives and low‑level operational troubleshooting within high‑pressure environments.
• Leadership & Mentorship – Experience coaching engineers, delegating work effectively, and helping teams develop technical maturity and operational ownership.
• Clear Communication – Strong interpersonal and communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts, incidents, and trade‑offs clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences.

Desired Qualifications & Competencies

• Scaling Experience – You have operated systems that required reliability, observability, and performance at scale — and understand the operational realities of where systems fail.
• Incident Leadership – You have led or contributed significantly to major incident management, driving resolution and learning through structured operational processes.
• DevOps & Automation – Strong understanding of automation‑first infrastructure practices and enabling engineering autonomy through tooling and platforms.
• Modern Infrastructure – Experience working with containerisation technologies, orchestration platforms, and distributed event‑driven systems such as Kafka.
• Operational Excellence – Practical experience with monitoring, observability, capacity planning, and continuous improvement methodologies.
• Agile & Lean Principles – Comfortable working within Agile environments and collaborating closely with engineering, product, and operational stakeholders.

Why This Role?

This is an opportunity to play a key role in shaping the future of Partnerize’s infrastructure and operational landscape. You will work on complex, large‑scale systems, influence platform direction, modernise legacy environments, and help evolve our engineering culture towards greater autonomy, reliability, and scalability. If you enjoy solving difficult technical problems, operating at scale, mentoring engineers, and driving meaningful platform improvements – this role offers both the technical depth and strategic impact to do exactly that.

UK Benefits & Perks

• 28 days holiday in addition to bank holidays
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Private Medical Insurance through Vitality
• Enhanced pension contributions
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Eye Care Vouchers
• Life Assurance
• Enhanced Wellness Program including access to EAP, Wellness Coaching & Wellness Fridays program
• Regular company events and activities

Our Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion

We are committed to attracting, developing, and advancing our outstanding team members, regardless of race, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, religion, age, gender, gender identity, physical abilities, or any other dimension of diversity. We strive to foster an environment where people can be their authentic selves, raise concerns and innovate, all without fear; where they are treated fairly and respectfully, have equal access to opportunities and resources and can contribute fully to the organization’s success. Every individual in our business is expected to live this commitment without exception.

Privacy and Data Protection

The data collected as part of this application will be used for the recruitment process and any subsequent employment. You can find further information in Partnerize privacy policy here: https://partnerize.com/privacy-policy/

Notice to Recruiters and Staffing Agencies

To protect the interests of all parties, Partnerize will not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than directly from a candidate or an approved vendor that has a written and signed agreement in place with Partnerize. Please do not contact or forward resumes to our company employees or locations. Any unsolicited resumes will be considered Partnerize property. Partnerize is not responsible for any charges or fees related to unsolicited resumes.