Infrastructure Reliability Engineering Lead in London

The Infrastructure Reliability Engineering Lead is responsible for leading and developing the Infrastructure Reliability Engineering team, ensuring the successful implementation of reliability engineering practices across the infrastructure platforms that underpin LME services. Working under the direction of the Infrastructure Reliability Engineering Senior Manager, the role translates Infrastructure Reliability Engineering strategy, standards and governance into practical engineering outcomes and measurable improvements in service reliability, resilience and operational risk reduction.

The role is accountable for driving engineering excellence across observability, resilience engineering, automation, operational readiness and service reliability. The postholder will lead a team of specialist Infrastructure Reliability Engineers, ensuring infrastructure services are designed, operated and continuously improved in a secure, recoverable, observable and supportable manner.

The Infrastructure Reliability Engineering Lead will work closely with Compute Service Operations, Information Security, Application Delivery and other technology teams to identify reliability risks, improve platform resilience, reduce operational toil through automation and ensure infrastructure services meet business, regulatory and operational requirements. The initial emphasis of the role will be to establish and mature Infrastructure Reliability Engineering practices, operational readiness assessments, resilience validation, platform observability standards and reliability-focused automation across critical infrastructure services.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead, coach and develop the Infrastructure Reliability Engineering team, setting clear direction, priorities, objectives and performance expectations.
• Build and maintain a high-performing engineering team through effective recruitment, performance management, coaching, mentoring and succession planning.
• Allocate engineering resources effectively across reliability improvement initiatives, resilience programmes, operational readiness activities and platform engineering priorities.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, accountability, continuous improvement and shared ownership of service reliability.
• Lead implementation and continual improvement of Infrastructure Reliability Engineering practices across infrastructure and platform services.
• Define, measure and improve Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), availability metrics and reliability measures across critical infrastructure services.
• Identify, assess and drive remediation of reliability risks and systemic weaknesses before they impact production services.
• Establish and govern observability standards across infrastructure platforms including monitoring, telemetry, logging, tracing and alerting.
• Ensure meaningful operational visibility and actionable service health monitoring across infrastructure services.
• Lead improvements in monitoring quality, alert effectiveness and operational insights through data-driven analysis.
• Lead resilience validation activities including failover testing, disaster recovery testing, recovery assurance exercises and scenario-based resilience assessments.
• Establish and maintain Operational Readiness standards, ensuring services meet agreed supportability, recoverability, observability and operational acceptance criteria before entering production.
• Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code, configuration management and automation practices across infrastructure services.
• Support the Infrastructure Reliability Engineering Senior Manager in implementing and maturing the Infrastructure Reliability Engineering operating model, standards and governance frameworks.

PERSON SPECIFICATION:

Academic and Professional Qualifications Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology or a related technical discipline.
• Significant experience in Infrastructure Reliability Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering or Infrastructure Engineering disciplines.
• Demonstrable experience leading technical engineering teams within complex enterprise environments.

Required Knowledge and Level of Experience:

Candidates should have significant experience operating within complex enterprise technology environments, ideally within financial services or other highly regulated organisations, together with a strong track record of leading teams responsible for critical infrastructure services and engineering outcomes.

The successful candidate will demonstrate strong people leadership, sound technical judgement and the ability to influence engineering decisions across multiple technology domains. They will possess broad expertise in reliability engineering, resilience, observability, automation and platform engineering, while remaining capable of contributing hands-on where required.

Technical Skills set and Core Competencies Required for Role:

• Strong understanding of Infrastructure Reliability Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering principles and practices.
• Experience defining and improving SLIs, SLOs, availability targets and reliability metrics.
• Strong scripting/automation capability (e.g., Python, Bash, Ansible, Terraform, GitOps).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitLab, etc).
• Strong observability skills—including metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger.
• Good understanding of enterprise infrastructure platforms including Linux, virtualisation, container platforms and cloud-native technologies.
• Strong understanding of resilience engineering, disaster recovery, and service continuity principles.
• Experience conducting root cause analysis and driving long-term reliability improvements.
• Understanding of operational readiness, service transition and supportability principles.
• Knowledge of infrastructure security, hardening, compliance controls and operational risk management.
• Understanding of ITIL-aligned Incident, Problem, Change and Service Management disciplines.

The following experience would be advantageous:

• Experience establishing or maturing Infrastructure Reliability Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering or Platform Engineering capabilities.
• Experience operating within financial services, exchanges, clearing organisations or other highly regulated environments.
• Experience supporting Kubernetes, OpenShift or cloud-native platform ecosystems.
• Experience implementing enterprise observability solutions and telemetry platforms.
• Experience leading operational readiness reviews and infrastructure service acceptance activities.
• Experience delivering large-scale infrastructure automation and standardisation initiatives.
• Experience working with third-party technology providers, managed service partners and infrastructure suppliers.
• Experience supporting significant infrastructure transformation or platform modernisation programmes.

Skills and competencies:

• Strong people leadership, coaching and team development skills.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting and problem-solving capability.
• Excellent stakeholder management and relationship-building skills.
• Ability to provide technical leadership while maintaining focus on delivery, governance and business outcomes.
• Strong planning, prioritisation and organisational skills.
• Excellent written, verbal and presentation skills.
• Strong focus on automation, standardisation and continuous improvement.
• Data-driven and evidence-based approach to decision-making.
• Demonstrates ownership, accountability and engineering excellence.
• Comfortable operating within high-pressure, business-critical and regulated environments.