Lead Site Reliability Engineer in Darlington

Job DescriptionBecome part of a mission-driven digital team helping to build reliable, secure and scalable digital services that support economic growth across the UK.

Based in London, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham or Salford, this permanent Grade 7 opportunity offers hybrid working, flexible working patterns and a salary of £63,824 to £80,158 depending on location (London £67,547 to £83,778) and technical skills assessed at interview.

Shape Reliable Digital Services at the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST):

Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade has a clear mission: to grow the economy by helping businesses invest, innovate, export and grow across the UK. BIST's Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates the tools and services that enable this mission. As a Senior SRE Squad Lead, you will play a key role in leading engineers while remaining hands-on in the design, delivery and continuous improvement of reliable, secure and scalable platform services that underpin critical digital products and services.

As a Senior SRE Squad Lead you will:

• Lead and support a team of Site Reliability Engineers, setting clear direction while fostering an inclusive, collaborative and high-performing team culture.
• Build strong working relationships with product, delivery and architecture colleagues to ensure platform services meet business and user needs.
• Provide technical leadership across DevOps and SRE practices, guiding teams to adopt approaches that support reliability, sustainability and continuous improvement.
• Coach, mentor and support engineers across DDaT, contributing to a supportive and diverse engineering community.
• Design, build and maintain reliable, secure and scalable cloud-based infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches.
• Enable teams to develop effective observability practices, including monitoring, logging, metrics and alerting that support proactive service management.
• Work with teams to define and embed Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets in a pragmatic and user-focused way.
• Support the development and continual improvement of CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, frequent and low-risk delivery of changes.
• Oversee live service reliability, supporting teams through incident and problem management while encouraging a learning-focused, blameless culture.
• Ensure security, resilience and compliance considerations are understood and embedded into engineering practices.

Essential skills for the Senior SRE Squad Lead include:

• Experience leading, supporting and developing engineers, including line management or strong mentoring experience.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly and build effective relationships with a range of stakeholders.
• Experience of working with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, applying modern DevOps and SRE practices.
• Experience designing and delivering infrastructure-as-code solutions using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation or similar.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable and well-tested code in at least one programming .
• Experience designing, operating and improving distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user impact.

In return, you can expect a flexible working culture, including:

• Flexible hybrid working, typically 2-3 days per week in the office.
• Full-time, part-time and flexible working options.
• A Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%.
• Annual leave starting at 25 days, rising to 30 days with service.
• Three paid volunteering days every year.
• Learning and development tailored to your role.
• Access to professional qualifications, certifications and technical training.
• An inclusive culture that encourages learning, collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Employee benefits including cycle-to-work and wider Civil Service benefits.

Why Join BIST?

This is an opportunity to combine technical leadership with hands‑on engineering in a modern cloud environment. You'll work alongside experienced SRE and DevOps professionals, helping shape platform strategy, improve service reliability and support the delivery of critical digital services across government. The team is actively investing in observability, service-level management, platform automation, developer experience and cloud engineering. You'll join a culture that values collaboration, continuous learning and the freedom to explore new ideas, while making a tangible impact on services used across the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.

Additional Information

This role requires SC clearance. DBT's requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years. Failure to meet this requirement will result in your application being rejected and your offer withdrawn.

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