Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) - Defence
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) - Defence / National Security - £75k - Farnborough - Hybrid
A permanent opportunity for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer who enjoys building secure, automated, and highly reliable platforms. This role sits within a defence and national security environment, working on modern infrastructure where automation, resilience, and secure-by-design principles are fundamental.
You'll work closely with platform engineers, infrastructure teams, and operational stakeholders to take requirements from early design and proof-of-concept through to production. The role blends hands-on engineering with technical design, offering real influence over tooling, standards, and DevOps ways of working. It suits someone curious, detail-oriented, and comfortable working in complex, regulated environments.
What you'll be doing
- Designing, delivering, upgrading, and maintaining core platforms, services, and automations
- Building and improving monitoring, alerting, and observability platforms
- Designing secure infrastructure using automation-first approaches
- Creating and productionising proofs of concept for new tools and technologies
- Diagnosing and resolving performance, reliability, and availability issues
- Supporting architecture, documentation, and non-functional requirements
- Mentoring engineers and helping improve DevOps and SRE practices
Essential experience
- Strong experience with Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows Server environments
- Hands-on scripting skills (Bash, Python, PowerShell or similar)
- Proven experience with automation and DevOps tooling (Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD, Git)
- Experience working with Azure or similar cloud platforms
- Solid understanding of infrastructure reliability, monitoring, and incident response
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work across multiple priorities
- Willingness to work in secure, regulated environments (SC eligibility required)
Desirable experience
- Infrastructure-as-Code lifecycle and best practices
- Containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Configuration management and desired state tooling
- Application and platform monitoring tools (Splunk, Nagios or similar)
- Experience hardening systems and conducting security assessments
- Understanding of Agile and DevOps principles in practice
A collaborative, inclusive culture with strong benefits including competitive pay, bonus, pension, private healthcare, generous leave, professional development, wellbeing perks, and modern on-site facilities.