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.