Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer in Watford

Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer in Watford

Watford Full-Time 63000 - 77000 £ / year (est.) No working from home possible
PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein)

At a Glance

  • Tasks: Lead reliability engineering to ensure high performance and resilience of customer-facing systems.
  • Company: Join Allwyn UK, a leading multi-national lottery operator with a purpose-driven mission.
  • Benefits: Competitive salary, flexible working options, and opportunities for professional growth.
  • Other info: Collaborative culture with a focus on automation and continuous improvement.
  • Why this job: Be part of a transformative journey that impacts lives through responsible lottery operations.
  • Qualifications: Strong experience in cloud environments, SRE practices, and incident management.

The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.

At the heart of everything we do is our vision to change lives every day, and our mission to grow The National Lottery responsibly and champion its impact. We are Allwyn UK, part of the Allwyn Entertainment Group - a multi-national lottery operator with a market-leading presence across the USA and Europe. While the main contribution of The National Lottery to society is through the funds to good causes, at Allwyn we put our purpose and values at the heart of everything we do.

A bit about the role

The Senior/Lead Site Reliability Engineer is responsible for technical leadership of reliability engineering across the digital estate, ensuring high availability, performance, and resilience of customer-facing systems during both normal operation and peak lottery events. The role combines hands-on engineering, incident leadership, and ownership of the SRE improvement backlog and reporting, working across platform, product, and operational teams.

Objectives of the role

  • Own reliability outcomes across services using SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets
  • Improve availability, latency, and scalability across Instant-Win and Draw-based platforms
  • Lead incident response and operational readiness, including peak jackpot events
  • Drive automation and platform maturity, reducing manual operational effort
  • Establish clear reporting on reliability, incidents, and service health trends
  • Support with thought-leadership and developing long-term roadmap

What you’ll be doing

  • Reliability engineering & technical leadership
    • Define and govern SLOs / SLIs / error budgets across critical services
    • Lead reliability design reviews across: Web & mobile platforms, Player Identity & Protection systems, CMS and Geolocation services
    • Drive architecture improvements for resilience (failover, degradation, scaling patterns)
  • Production operations & incident leadership
    • Act as incident commander for major incidents and high-severity events
    • Lead 1-in-4 on-call rotation, covering: Out-of-hours incident diagnosis, Peak jackpot proactive monitoring
    • Own end-to-end incident lifecycle: Detection -> triage -> resolution -> post-incident review
    • Ensure blameless post-mortems with clear remediation ownership
  • Observability & service insight
    • Define and evolve observability strategy using: Splunk, CloudWatch, Grafana, Quantum Metric
    • Standardise: Alerting quality and signal-to-noise ratio, Dashboards aligned to SLOs and customer impact
    • Drive correlation between technical signals and user experience
  • Automation & platform engineering
    • Lead automation of operational processes using Terraform and scripting
    • Improve deployment and release safety (CI/CD, progressive delivery patterns)
    • Key contributor to transition strategy for ECS → EKS (Kubernetes adoption)
    • Reduce operational toil through tooling, self-healing, observability and platform improvements
    • Empower Level-1 operational teams with safe, controlled access to the tools they need to operate autonomously
  • Capacity & performance engineering
    • Own capacity planning for: High-concurrency draw events, Traffic spikes during jackpots
    • Lead performance optimisation: Latency reduction, Throughput scaling, Cost efficiency
  • Backlog ownership & reporting
    • Own and prioritise the SRE backlog, balancing: Reliability improvements, Technical debt, Automation opportunities
    • Produce structured reporting covering: SLO performance, Incident trends and MTTR, Platform health and risk areas
    • Provide clear updates to engineering leadership and business stakeholders
  • Collaboration & culture
    • Embed SRE practices across engineering teams
    • Mentor engineers and SREs on: Reliability engineering, Observability, Incident management
    • Promote a culture of automation, measurement, and continuous improvement
    • Support with thought-leadership and developing long-term SRE roadmap for Digital Operations

What experience we're looking for

  • Technical
    • Strong experience in cloud environments, ideally AWS
    • Hands-on experience with: Terraform, Observability stacks
    • Strong programming skills (Python, Go, or similar)
    • Proven experience implementing: SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, Incident management frameworks, Observability strategies
    • Strong experience in distributed systems troubleshooting
  • Operational
    • Experience in on-call production environments
    • Demonstrated leadership during high-severity incidents
  • Desirable Experience
    • Experience migrating container

Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer in Watford employer: PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein)

Intapp is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work environment that fosters innovation and collaboration within the accounting and consulting sectors across EMEA. With a strong commitment to employee growth, Intapp provides ample opportunities for professional development and leadership coaching, ensuring that team members thrive in their careers while contributing to the company's strategic vision. The culture is built on accountability and high performance, making it an ideal place for those looking to make a significant impact in a rapidly evolving industry.

PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein)

Contact Details:

PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein) Recruitment Team

StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫

We think this is how you could land Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer in Watford

Join Local Tech Meetups

Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein) or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!

Contribute to Open Source Projects

Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein).

Tap into Online Developer Communities

Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein).

Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles

Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein) that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!

We think you need these skills to ace Senior / Lead Site Reliability Engineer in Watford

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Cloud Environments (AWS, ECS, EKS/Kubernetes)
Terraform (Infrastructure as Code)
Observability Stacks (Splunk, CloudWatch, Grafana)
Programming Skills (Python, Go, or similar)
SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets Implementation
Incident Management Frameworks

Some tips for your application 🫡

Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.

Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein).

Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein) and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!

Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!

How to prepare for a job interview at PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein)

Brush Up on Your Coding Skills

For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.

Know Your Tools and Frameworks

Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If PVH (Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein) uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.

Showcase Your Projects

Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.

Prepare for Behavioural Questions

While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.