Lead Site Reliability Engineer


Company:	Government Recruitment Service
Salary:	£68,732 to £88,423 a year
Hours:	Full-time
Location:	Darlington
Job type:	Permanent
Posting date:	23 Oct 2026
Closing date:	11 Nov 2026

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Summary

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) helps businesses invest, innovate, export and grow across the UK. The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate helps to deliver this by designing, building and running the services, platforms and technology that businesses and colleagues rely on every day.

Our teams work on a wide range of services and technologies, including:

digital services that help businesses access government support, guidance and opportunities

data and AI products that support decision making and enable innovation

internal tools and services that help colleagues work more effectively

secure technology and platforms that support critical government services

cyber security services that protect systems, data and users

By joining DDaT, you'll work on services used by businesses, colleagues and citizens across the UK. You'll be part of multidisciplinary teams focused on improving services, solving complex problems and delivering better outcomes for users.

We are committed to creating an inclusive and supportive workplace. In recognition of this, we were named Best Public Sector Employer at the Women in Tech Employer Awards 2025!

As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you will lead a team of Site Reliability Engineers while providing technical leadership across the design, delivery and continuous improvement of reliable, scalable and secure services that underpin critical BIST digital products. 

You’ll work across modern cloud technologies and collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to improve how we build and operate services. From observability and monitoring through to CI/CD, infrastructure as code and service-level objectives, you’ll help teams build resilient services and make informed decisions about reliability, performance and operational risk. 

This is a hands-on technical leadership role alongside responsibility for developing and supporting your team. You’ll help shape our approach to Site Reliability Engineering, improve reliability and reduce operational burden, while creating an environment where engineers can learn, develop and do their best work 

You’ll work closely with product managers, architects, delivery colleagues and engineers across DDaT, helping to shape platform strategy and influence good engineering practices. You’ll also help build and scale our global platform, support live services through an on-call rota and lead improvements that enhance service quality and delivery outcomes. 

In BIST this role is known as Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Lead 

You will:

Lead and develop a team of Site Reliability Engineers, providing technical direction, coaching and support.

Provide technical leadership across SRE and DevOps, helping teams build reliable, scalable and sustainable services.

Design, build and maintain cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches.

Lead the adoption of effective observability, including monitoring, logging, metrics and alerting.

Help teams define and use SLIs, SLOs and error budgets to make informed decisions about reliability and delivery.

Improve CI/CD and engineering automation to enable safe, frequent and low-risk change.

Oversee live-service reliability and support effective incident and problem management, promoting a learning-focused and blameless culture.

Work with product, delivery and architecture colleagues to ensure platform services meet user and business needs.

Coach and mentor engineers and contribute to the wider DDaT engineering community.

Ensure security, resilience and compliance are embedded into engineering practices.

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