Find Your Dream Job

Role: SRE Lead Architect

Location: Birmingham (Hybrid 3 days in a week to onsite)

Type: Contract (Inside IR35)

Role Overview:

• We are seeking a Lead Technical Subject Matter Expert (SME) with strong systems thinking and a solid grasp of SRE principles to drive the technical uplift of capacity and observability controls across our technology estate. This role blends hands-on engineering depth with architectural oversight and focuses on enhancing performance, resilience, and control effectiveness across services and platforms.
• The ideal candidate brings both operational sensibility and the ability to drive scalable solutions — aligning technical capabilities with internal control frameworks and regulatory expectations.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and technical evaluation of capacity management, utilisation monitoring, and observability controls across platforms.
• Apply SRE-aligned practices to identify control gaps, performance risks, and areas for automation.
• Assess existing tooling, data flows and operational practices to identify control gaps and propose remediation strategies.
• Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure, architecture, and risk teams to validate technical designs and implementation plans.
• Define reusable technical patterns and tooling strategies that enhance operational readiness and control sustainability.
• Support roadmap shaping, tooling assessment, and documentation for governance and operational readiness.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 10+ years in engineering, infrastructure, or technical architecture roles in complex technology environments.
• Solid understanding of compute, storage, and network capacity planning across mixed deployment models.
• Familiarity with SRE disciplines such as observability, service-level indicators/objectives (SLIs/SLOs), and automation of operational tasks.
• Demonstrated ability to interpret and apply control requirements in technical design contexts.
• Hands-on experience with performance monitoring, alerting systems, and diagnostic tooling (e.g., Geneos, Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, or similar tools).
• Strong communication skills — able to convey technical concepts to senior stakeholders and control partners.

Desirable:

• Experience in implementing or uplifting operational controls (capacity, performance, availability).
• Exposure to internal risk frameworks or external regulatory requirements (e.g., DORA, EBA, PRA).
• Background in service reliability, system diagnostics, or incident response.