Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Pay up to £78,517 plus 28.97% employer pension contributions, hybrid working, flexible hours, and a truly great work life balance.

DWP Digital with Purpose.

We have a fantastic opportunity to join our community of experts at DWP Digital as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, within one of our SRE teams at the heart of Digital Transformation. We’re using fresh ideas and leading‑edge tech to build and maintain digital solutions that will be used by nearly every person in the UK, every day and at key moments in their lives.

DWP is the UK’s largest government department. We help people into work and make payments worth over £195 bn a year to support and empower millions of people. The scale of what we do is extraordinary, and our purpose is unique. We’d love you to join us.

What skills, knowledge and experience will you need?

• Automation expertise – proven experience in scripting to automate processes, eliminate manual tasks, and implement infrastructure and configuration as code.
• CI/CD pipeline development – demonstrated ability to build and enhance CI/CD pipelines for efficient and reliable software delivery.
• Development – demonstrable experience of developing cloud‑based and supporting cloud‑based applications in AWS & Azure.
• Incident resolution – strong experience in resolving complex technical incidents, ensuring minimal downtime and swift recovery.
• Reliability engineering – expertise in reliability engineering, including capacity and performance management through effective monitoring, logging, and alerting.
• Leadership – demonstrated ability to engage with stakeholders at all levels, provide valuable feedback and support, mentor junior engineers, and drive improvements in working practices.

You and your role

Your day will be all about making sure our applications and infrastructure are reliable, secure and ready for scale. You’ll work closely with development teams from the design stage, helping them build systems that follow best practices and meet departmental standards. You’ll lead by example, mentor other SREs, guide teams, and drive improvements.

A big part of your role will be creating and maintaining detailed runbooks so incidents can be resolved quickly and efficiently. You’ll also automate repetitive tasks, reduce toil and ensure monitoring is in place so issues are spotted before they become problems. When major incidents happen, you’ll take the lead in coordinating the right people and restoring services fast.

You’ll manage error budgets, review high‑priority incidents and push a culture of engineering ownership across the organisation.

Details – wages, perks & benefits

Location: One of our digital hubs in Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield, whichever is most convenient for you.

Hybrid working: We work a hybrid model – you’ll spend some time working at home and some time collaborating face‑to‑face in a hub.

Pay: Competitive pay of up to £78,517.

Pension: Civil service pension with employer contributions worth 28.97%, over £16,000 per year.

Holidays: Generous leave package starting at 26 days rising to 31 days over time, plus up to three extra days off a month on flexi‑time. All public holidays are also granted.

Benefits package includes:

• An award‑winning environment and culture: Employer of the Year 2023 (Women In IT Awards), Founders Award for Outstanding Digital Leadership 2023 (Digital 100)
• Flexible working including flexible hours and flex‑friendly policies
• Time off volunteering and charitable giving
• Bring your authentic self to work with “I Can Be Me in DWP”
• Discounts and savings on shopping, fun days out and more
• Interest‑free loans to buy a bike or a season ticket, making commuting easier
• Professional development, coaching, mentoring and career progression opportunities

Process

We know your time is valuable, so our application and selection process are just two stages:

• Apply: complete your application on Civil Service Jobs. Full instructions will be provided during the application.
• Interview: a single stage online interview.

Click Apply for more information and to start your application.