Principal SRE Engineer

Job DescriptionWe are looking for a Principal Site Reliability Engineer(SRE) to set the technical direction for the reliability, performance, and scalability of our hybrid infrastructure. As the most senior technical authority in the SRE function, you will define architecture and engineering standards across cloud and on-premise environments, promote the use of modern SRE practices. This is a hands-on, technical role (~90%) with influence and technical mentorship responsibilities (~10%). You will operate as a force multiplier, raising the technical bar for the entire engineering organisation rather than managing a team directly. Technical Responsibilities (~90%) Architect scalable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud and hybrid solutions, and establish the patterns and reference implementations other teams build on.Define the observability strategy across the organisation: monitoring, logging, alerting, SLIs/SLOs and error budgets using Datadog, Elastic, OpenTelemetry, and similar tooling.Set standards for high availability, disaster recovery, and backup across hybrid environments, and validate them through failure testing.Partner with development, security, and platform teams to shape deployment pipelines (CI/CD) and GitOps workflows at scale.Establish and maintain organisation-wide technical documentation, runbooks, architectural decision records, and operational standards.Identify systemic reliability bottlenecks, lead complex root-cause analysis, and reduce operational load through automation and platform improvements.Troubleshoot and resolve the most complex, production issues, and lead major incident response.Provide deep 3rd line technical support and participate in the on-call rotation as an escalation point.Technical Leadership & Influence (~10%) Be a technical mentor for SREs and engineers across teams, raising the engineering bar through coaching and knowledge-sharing.Lead structured up skilling and enablement across Windows, Linux, AWS, and Kubernetes.Influence and align Product, Engineering, Security, Platform, and Operations teams around reliability goals and technical direction.Shape the SRE roadmap together with SRE Leadership and SRE Guild and lead prioritisation of main reliability and platform programmes.Communicate technical strategy and trade-offs to both engineering teams and senior partners, and lead accountability for reliability outcomes.Champion a culture of operational excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement across the organisation.