Sr Service Reliability Engineer – Kings Cross, London

Music is Universal. It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that 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 are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation.

We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email UniversalMusicCareers@umusic.com.

Job Summary: We are UMG, the Universal Music Group. We are the world’s leading music company. In everything we do, we are committed to artistry, innovation and entrepreneurship. We own and operate a broad array of businesses engaged in recorded music, music publishing, merchandising, and audiovisual content in more than 60 countries. We identify and develop recording artists and songwriters, and we produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to delight and entertain fans around the world.

As a key member of our Global Technical Operations team, you will be the ultimate escalation point and subject matter expert for all SRE operations. This is a senior technical role that requires a strategic mindset, deep-seated expertise in System Reliability Engineering. By blending a software engineering mindset with operational expertise, you will engineer solutions that improve system reliability, automate complex processes, and reduce manual toil. You will not only resolve the most challenging technical issues but also drive the operational strategy for SRE implementation at UMG.

As a Site Reliability Engineer, you won't just be supporting systems; you'll be ensuring the services that connect artists and fans around the globe are always on.

Job Functions:

• 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., using 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 our operational toolset. Support and optimize 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.
• Act as the Final Escalation Point for SRE operations: Participate in resolving the most complex and critical incidents, which other teams have been unable to solve. Provide leadership during high-severity events, coordinating cross-functional teams to ensure rapid and effective resolution.
• Develop Escalation Frameworks: Design, implement, and refine the escalation management process for the entire Global Technical Operations Center, ensuring that incidents are triaged, documented, and resolved efficiently.
• Strategic Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis: Move beyond simple fixes to conduct deep-dive root cause analysis (RCA) for recurring, complex problems. Develop long-term solutions, including automation and architectural changes, to prevent future incidents.
• Mentor & Uplevel the Team: Serve as a technical leader and mentor to junior engineers. Develop and lead training sessions on advanced security concepts, threat landscapes, and internal best practices to elevate the entire team's capabilities. Foster a culture of continuous learning and operational excellence within the team. Maintain and enhance knowledge of key technologies.
• Architectural Collaboration: Partner with Dev Ops and Applications architects to influence and enforce standards. Ensure that new and existing systems are built on the principles of Infrastructure as Code and toil reduction.
• Automation & Optimization: Identify opportunities for network automation, scripting, and tool development to streamline operational tasks and improve efficiency.
• Documentation & Standards: Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for configurations, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and incident response protocols.
• Communication & Stakeholder Management: Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior management, regarding incident status, resolution plans, and identity or security issues. Build partnerships and trust with other information technology areas, vendor technical staff, and customers in the business units.
• Make UMG the place to be: Mentoring and genuinely leading the team in a way that attracts and retains the best talent. UMG is a place where everyone can bring themselves fully to work and thrive, as a Leader you are a key part of this.
• Work out of standard business hours will occasionally be required.

Job Requirements:

• Required Experience & Skills: A strong background in systems administration (Linux/Windows) in a large-scale environment. Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., 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 (e.g., Terraform, Ansible). Experience with modern monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace). Proven analytical and problem-solving abilities with experience in a high-pressure environment. Excellent communication skills and the ability to foster a collaborative team environment.
• Preferred Experience & Skills: Bachelor’s degree in an IT-related field. Experience managing large-scale, distributed systems for a global organization. Familiarity with IT governance standards like ITIL. Direct experience with ServiceNow for IT service management. Knowledge of chaos engineering, resilience testing, and advanced capacity planning.

Just So You Know… The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder's specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.