Sr Service Reliability Engineer in London

Equal Opportunity Statement

We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and are committed to ensuring no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and wholeheartedly embrace talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other neurocognitive variations.

Job Summary

We are UMG, the Universal Music Group – the world’s leading music company. We identify and develop recording artists and songwriters, and we produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music across more than 60 countries. As part of our Global Technical Operations team, you will be the ultimate escalation point and subject‑matter expert for all Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) operations. This senior technical role requires a strategic mindset and deep expertise in system reliability engineering to engineer solutions that improve system reliability, automate complex processes, and reduce manual toil while driving the operational strategy for SRE implementation at UMG.

Responsibilities

• System Reliability & Performance
  • Design, build, and maintain the availability, scalability, and performance of critical services.
  • Develop and maintain robust monitoring, alerting, and observability systems (e.g., AWS CloudWatch, Dynatrace) to ensure rapid issue detection and resolution.
  • Monitor infrastructure capacity and performance, providing analysis and suggestions for service delivery improvement.
• Automation & Efficiency
  • Drive the automation of repetitive operational tasks, including infrastructure provisioning, deployments, and scaling.
  • Create and maintain scripts and custom code to support and enhance the operational toolset.
  • Support and optimise CI/CD pipelines to improve deployment speed and reliability.
• Incident Management & Collaboration
  • Participate in an on‑call rotation to troubleshoot and mitigate production incidents.
  • Lead post‑incident reviews and root‑cause analyses to implement lasting solutions.
  • Partner with engineering and IT stakeholders to embed SRE best practices (SLOs, error budgets) into the design and development lifecycle.
• Escalation Leadership
  • Act as the final escalation point for SRE operations, leading cross‑functional teams during high‑severity events.
  • Design, implement, and refine the escalation management process for the Global Technical Operations Center.
• Strategic Troubleshooting & Root‑Cause Analysis
  • Conduct deep‑dive root‑cause analysis for recurring, complex problems, and develop long‑term automation and architectural solutions.
• Mentoring & Team Development
  • Serve as a technical leader and mentor to junior engineers, leading training sessions on advanced security and best practices.
  • Foster continuous learning and operational excellence within the team.
• Architectural Collaboration
  • Partner with DevOps and application architects to enforce standards and ensure new systems adhere to Infrastructure as Code principles.
  • Identify opportunities for network automation and tool development to streamline tasks.
• Documentation & Standards
  • Create and maintain comprehensive documentation, SOPs, and incident response protocols.
• Communication & Stakeholder Management
  • Communicate incident status, resolution plans, and security issues to technical and non‑technical stakeholders, including senior management.
• Work‑Hours
  • Occasional work outside standard business hours may be required.

Qualifications

• A strong background in systems administration (Linux/Windows) in a large‑scale environment.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (Python, Go, Java).
• Hands‑on experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure), with a high preference for AWS.
• Solid understanding of networking, containers (Docker, Kubernetes), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Experience with modern monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace).
• Proven analytical and problem‑solving abilities in a high‑pressure environment.
• Excellent communication skills and collaborative mindset.
• Preferred: Bachelor’s degree in an IT‑related field.
• Preferred: Experience managing large‑scale, distributed systems for a global organization.
• Preferred: Familiarity with IT governance standards like ITIL.
• Preferred: Direct experience with ServiceNow for IT service management.
• Preferred: Knowledge of chaos engineering, resilience testing, and advanced capacity planning.