Senior Site Reliability Engineer in Newcastle upon Tyne

At Partnerize, we’re on a mission to transform the way businesses grow. We’ve built the leading partnership automation platform that empowers brands to discover, engage, and convert their audiences at scale. From affiliate marketing to influencer collaborations, we help our clients build and manage profitable partnerships that drive real results.

We’re looking for passionate, talented people who want to be part of a winning team. At Partnerize, you’ll find a culture of collaboration, innovation, and respect. We’re guided by our core values, and we’re committed to creating an environment where everyone can do their best work. We also offer a competitive salary, generous benefits, and a flexible work environment that allows you to thrive both personally and professionally.

This is a captivating and exciting time to join Partnerize. We are at a pivotal point in our tech progression, looking to significantly expand our technical estate, scale the platform, and replace existing legacy systems with modern solutions. You will play a vital role in the ongoing operationalisation and management of our entire platform portfolio found in our on‑prem data centres and AWS cloud: Partnerize, BrandVerity, Ascend, and our recent acquisition, Konnecto.

While there will be a key focus on maintaining and supporting our on‑prem live platform systems, a critical pillar of your mission will be spearheading the onboarding of our enterprise on‑prem containerisation solution. This initiative is designed to fundamentally shift our engineering culture towards a “you build it, you own it” model. By providing robust, automated container platforms, you will empower our Engineering teams to deploy quickly and independently, significantly reducing the bottleneck created by relying solely on the TechOps department.

We are looking for a Senior SRE who is both a deep technical expert and a capable mentor. In this role, your primary responsibility is ensuring our diverse, hybrid systems remain available, scalable, and secure. You will act as an authoritative Subject Matter Expert (SME), championing developer autonomy, driving IT systems security policies, and working closely with the security compliance team to protect our platforms from threats while driving continuous integration and delivery.

You will be responsible for ensuring the continuous development and progression of team members. We are looking for a player/coach who can mentor, empower, and upskill talent. We have a mix of technical generalists, specialists, and junior engineers; you will help identify their strengths and constructively develop areas of weakness, guiding their technological career paths as we transition to a DevOps‑centric operating model.

You will operate in a fast‑paced, high‑velocity environment where your work directly and visibly shapes the company’s architectural future. This requires a highly adaptable and pragmatic Engineer who can balance strategic project delivery with hybrid‑estate maintenance. By applying modern incident management frameworks to troubleshooting and ticket management, you are responsible for ensuring all issues across our estate are addressed decisively and efficiently.

As a Senior SRE at Partnerize, you will:

• Deliver coaching sessions to the team/individuals
• Scope the work coming into the SRE team and delegate to the team members appropriately
• Provide primary operational support and engineering for multiple large, distributed software applications
• Build software and systems to manage platform infrastructure and applications
• Measure and optimise system performance, with an eye toward pushing our capabilities forward, getting ahead of customer needs, and innovating to continually improve
• Improve reliability, quality, and time‑to‑market of our suite of software solutions
• Drive improvements to Partnerize platforms security through strategic planning and collaboration with the security compliance team
• Produce production‑grade application security designs
• Perform design reviews and threat modelling of our services and products
• Perform vulnerability assessments and security testing
• Provide subject matter expertise on all areas of security and privacy throughout the Software Development lifecycle
• Liaise with development teams for design, code reviews and education
• Contribute to security strategy, security tooling selection and creation
• Conduct regular security assessments and code reviews
• Partner with development teams to improve services through rigorous testing and release procedures
• Participate in system design consulting, platform management, and capacity planning
• Work closely with development and tech teams ensuring technical issues and projects are correctly managed
• Deliver small and large technical projects in a prompt and timely manner
• Act as an escalation for support incidents and assignments while maintaining a high level of quality
• Be responsible for continuous improvement, continuous delivery and continuous integration
• Participate in the On‑Call Rotation

Essential Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Ability to mentor and coach team members
• Ability to lead on major incidents and communicate responses back to the rest of the business
• Ability to prioritise workload including take the lead on incidents and problem management
• Able to scope the work coming into the team and delegate appropriately
• Represent TechOps to the wider business and liaise with the other departments
• Develop the technological career paths for the individuals on the team
• Strong experience of databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis)
• Understanding of scripting languages (Python, Bash, PHP)
• Expertise with a programming language (Python, Go or Java)
• Experience of security in a DevOps environment
• Coding experience for automating/integrating security tools
• Knowledge of security in distributed systems at scale
• Experience of performing security design reviews, threat modelling and risk assessments
• Extensive knowledge of internet security issues and/or mobile security issues
• Knowledge of platform or application automated deployment and configuration management (Ansible, Docker, Terraform, etc)
• Containers technology knowledge essential (Kubernetes, Docker)
• Linux system administration skills
• Able to troubleshoot, diagnose and solve issues independently
• Self‑learner, ability to document learning as experience is gained
• Experience as part of a team supporting and maintaining an infrastructure
• A proactive approach to spotting problems, areas for improvement, and performance bottlenecks
• Knowledge of and experience with the ITIL practices

Desirable Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• An interest in development, new technologies and innovation
• Supporting development teams into the refactoring of technical debt
• Kubernetes, Docker and containers
• Experience with monitoring systems, e.g. Zabbix, Nagios
• Experience of JIRA and Confluence
• Nginx or web server technologies
• Gluster or storage technologies
• Git and version control
• Elasticsearch technologies – especially Kibana
• Experience with Apache Kafka and Druid

If you are an experienced technical expert who finds satisfaction in solving complex hybrid‑architectural challenges, driving DevOps cultural transformations, and building high‑performing teams, this is the role for you. You will have the autonomy to shape the technical integration of a major acquisition, modernise legacy systems, and implement the tools that empower our engineers to build and run their own software.

At Partnerize, we recognise it is unrealistic for a candidate to fulfil 100% of the criteria in this job description. We encourage you to apply if you feel you meet the majority of the requirements above. We know that skills evolve over time, so if you have a keen appetite to learn, innovate, and evolve alongside us, come join our team!

UK Benefits & Perks:

• 25 days holiday in addition to bank holidays
• Plus 5 extra "Partnerize Parental Days" each year
• 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

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.

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.