firstup - Sr. Site Reliability Engineer (UK)
Requirements
• BS or MS in Computer Science (or equivalent diplomas and/or certifications) with 8+ years of relevant experience. • Strong experience in Site Reliability Engineering, production engineering, platform engineering or a comparable role supporting large-scale, distributed, customer-facing applications, ideally in a multi-tenant environment. • Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot across the full technology stack, including application code, APIs, containers, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, networking, databases and third-party dependencies. • Strong experience operating production workloads in AWS and Kubernetes-based environments. • Strong understanding of observability principles, with hands-on experience in monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, and APM. Deep practical expertise with Datadog is required. • Proven experience defining and implementing SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, reliability scorecards and operational health metrics. • Experience diagnosing application latency, resource contention, database performance, dependency failures and complex distributed-system behavior. • Strong automation and software-engineering skills using one or more languages such as Python, Go, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript or similar. • Experience with infrastructure as code, including Terraform, as well as CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and automated deployment practices. • Strong ownership mindset with the ability to independently identify reliability gaps, prioritize improvements and drive initiatives through completion. • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex production issues and reliability risks to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. • Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation and continuously improve the on-call experience through better tooling, documentation and automation.
Responsibilities
• Partner closely with application engineering teams to design, build and operate reliable, scalable and resilient production services. • Work across both the application and infrastructure stacks, helping engineers identify and resolve reliability, performance and operational issues. • Establish and drive SRE best practices, including service-level indicators and objectives (SLIs/SLOs), error budgets, operational readiness reviews and production reliability standards. • Develop and maintain an SRE scorecard that measures service health, availability, resilience, observability, deployment quality and operational maturity. • Lead initiatives to reduce mean time to detect, acknowledge and recover (MTTD/MTTA/MTTR) through improved telemetry, automation, diagnostics and incident-response practices. • Own and evolve the monitoring and observability strategy across metrics, logs, traces, application performance monitoring, database monitoring, real-user monitoring and synthetic testing. • Improve end-to-end visibility by correlating application requests, infrastructure performance, database activity, dependencies and customer-impacting symptoms. • Lead and participate in incident response, facilitate effective technical investigations and ensure post-incident actions result in measurable reliability improvements. • Identify recurring operational work and eliminate toil through automation, self-service capabilities, standardized tooling and platform improvements. • Improve alert quality by establishing actionable alerts, service ownership, escalation paths, runbooks and automated remediation where appropriate. • Conduct capacity planning, performance engineering, failure-mode analysis and resilience testing for critical services. • Define production-readiness requirements for new services and major changes, including monitoring, alerting, scaling, security, rollback, backup and disaster-recovery expectations. • Partner with engineering teams to improve deployment safety through progressive delivery, automated validation, health checks and effective rollback mechanisms. • Provide technical leadership, mentoring and practical guidance that raises the operational maturity of engineering teams without creating dependency on the SRE function. • Communicate reliability risks, operational trends and improvement priorities clearly to engineering and business stakeholders. • Participate in on-call rotations, driving restoration and repair of service-impacting issues.
Benefits
• Because you care - about people, the work you do, and the connections you make. Work is such a large part of life; it only makes sense to make it awesome. • If you want to engage brilliant minds in a high-growth and inclusive environment where ideas are rewarded regardless of who they come from, join us. This is a rapidly changing space so if you thrive on ambiguity, are hungry for a challenge, and have the guts to speak your mind, you could be a perfect fit. • We offer an excellent PTO program, great health benefits, a casual and friendly environment, remote work, and a leadership team who truly believes in your growth – both personally and professionally.
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