Site Reliability Engineer Lead (City of London)

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Lead – Observability

Rate: £450-£475 per day (Inside IR35)

Location: London (Hybrid, 2 days on site per week)

Contract Role

Overview:

Join a high-impact team where you'll lead and shape the SRE and Observability function for a major transformation programme. This role goes beyond traditional SRE – you’ll champion best practices across product teams, drive observability strategy, and work hands-on with cutting-edge tools like Datadog and AWS.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the SRE function and promote observability-first thinking across development and operations teams.
• Define and implement the observability roadmap across product domains in collaboration with the client.
• Be hands-on with Datadog for infrastructure and application-level monitoring.
• Guide and review daily operations and improvements across observability platforms.
• Partner with engineering squads to deliver on observability requirements in an agile, demand-led way.

Core Skills & Experience:

• Proven experience as a hands-on SRE Engineer.
• Deep understanding of observability and monitoring practices.
• Practical experience with Datadog (or similar observability platforms).
• Strong DevOps toolchain knowledge: GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CodeQL, Nexus, CloudFormation, Terraform.
• Solid cloud engineering skills, especially with AWS (EC2, ELB, ECS, S3, CloudTrail, Config, Lambda, VPC, EFS).

Desirable Skills:

• Exposure to container-based platforms (e.g., Docker).
• Experience with configuration management tools like Chef.
• AWS certification (or willingness to pursue one).