SRE Lead

Key Objective: • Lead the Site Reliability Engineering function to define and drive the organisation’s reliability engineering strategy — bridging software development and operations through engineering discipline, not manual process. • Own the end-to-end reliability posture of production systems: define SLO/SLI frameworks, govern error budgets, and enforce production-readiness standards to protect business continuity. • Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing SRE team that prioritises engineering over toil — automating manual work, embedding reliability into the SDLC, and driving down mean time to recovery through systematic improvement. • Champion observability-led engineering through full-stack Dynatrace adoption, AIOps integration, and data-driven reliability decision-making at every layer of the stack. • Serve as the primary reliability engineering partner to development and platform leadership, shaping architecture decisions, release policies, and automation strategy. Key Responsibilities: • Define and drive the SRE strategy and multi-year roadmap aligned to business priorities. • Lead and develop the SRE team, including hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, and succession planning. • Own incident management, including severity classification, escalation, response SLAs, and leadership of major incidents. • Champion blameless postmortems, root cause analysis, and implementation of systemic fixes. • Establish and govern SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets, ensuring reliability targets are aligned to business needs. • Drive resilience engineering, including chaos engineering, GameDays, production readiness reviews, and failure mode analysis. • Reduce toil through automation, improved runbooks, and continuous operational improvement. • Own observability and alerting standards, including monitoring strategy, dashboards, and alert quality. • Partner with engineering, architecture, product, and leadership teams to embed reliability into design and delivery. • Represent the SRE function in senior forums and provide reporting on reliability, risk, and operational performance. Qualifications: • Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT, or a related technical field. • 8+ years’ experience in software engineering, platform reliability, or SRE, including 3+ years in people leadership. • Strong hands-on coding ability in Python, Go, or similar, with experience building automation and self-healing solutions. • Proven experience leading enterprise-scale SRE or platform reliability functions. • Experience defining and operating RTO/RPO and SLI/SLO frameworks. • Strong background in observability, production readiness, error budgets, and chaos engineering. • Experience leading on-call models, incident response, and executive stakeholder engagement. • Solid understanding of SDLC, Agile, and DevOps delivery models. • ITIL Foundation is desirable. Managerial & Soft Skills: • Proven people leader with experience building and coaching high-performing teams. • Strategic thinker who can turn business priorities into reliability roadmaps. • Strong communicator who can explain technical risk in business terms. • Calm and decisive during major incidents. • Influential partner across engineering, product, and leadership teams. • Strong advocate for developer experience and sustainable on-call practices. • Data-driven and able to balance reliability, speed, and cost. • Champions psychological safety, continuous learning, and operational excellence. Technical Skills: • Expert in Dynatrace, with experience in observability, monitoring, SLOs, tracing, and log management. • Proficient in Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, ELK, Azure Monitor, and Log Analytics. • Strong knowledge of OpenTelemetry and telemetry pipeline design. • Experience with ServiceNow, CI/CD tools, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and Bicep. • Familiar with Java, .NET, databases, APIs, Kafka, and cloud platforms, especially Azure. • Experience with AIOps, AI-assisted triage, and automation tooling. • Able to support reliability engineering through scripting, auto-remediation, and operational automation. Desired: • Experience in insurance or financial services. • Dynatrace, Azure, ITIL 4, or Google Cloud/SRE-related certifications. • Experience with chaos engineering, AIOps, MLOps, and FinOps. • Strong analytical skills and experience working with large operational datasets.