Site Reliability Engineer Team Lead

Job Title: English Technology Platform SRE Team Lead

Salary: £68,600 - £91,700

Location: Cambridge/Hybrid (with 2-3 days per week in office)

Contract: Permanent

Hours: Full time

Are you ready to shape the future of technology platforms at the heart of Cambridge's academic excellence? Join us as our English Technology Platform SRE Team Lead and help drive innovation, reliability, and intelligent automation in a world-class environment.

We are Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a world-leading academic publisher and assessment organisation and a proud part of the University of Cambridge.

About the role

The SRE Team Lead will lead a mature Site Reliability Engineering function within the Platform Operations Team, working closely with Platform Support and Engineering teams. This role demands strong thought leadership, technical depth, and strategic direction for the discipline, with a particular emphasis on leveraging AI-driven operations (AIOps) and FinOps practices to optimise reliability, performance, and cloud spend.

Although this is a hands-on technical role, the SRE Team Lead will also manage a small team of SRE, providing clear direction and ensuring consistent, data-driven, AI-enhanced service delivery across the platforms while working collaboratively with existing support and engineering groups.

• Apply core SRE and DevOps principles culture, automation, testing, measurement, and continuous improvement to build and optimise pipelines focused on rapid, reliable software delivery. Integrate AIOps capabilities, such as automated anomaly detection and intelligent alerting, to further enhance operational excellence.
• Work with Solutions Architecture, Development, and QA teams to automate processes wherever possible, creating and improving stable CI/CD pipelines for both software and infrastructure. Develop tools that enable rapid provisioning of environments and resources across all teams, incorporating AI-assisted automation where beneficial.
• Use automation, observability, and monitoring tools to improve site reliability and proactively identify issues. Support development teams with troubleshooting, particularly in infrastructure, networking, and multi-tier application design. Serve as a subject matter expert for cloud services especially AWS PaaS while applying FinOps practices to ensure cloud cost transparency, optimisation, and efficient resource usage.
• Create and maintain robust technical documentation for the infrastructure of the English platforms, including operational runbooks enhanced with predictive and AI-supported insights.

Stay engaged with developments in the SRE, DevOps, AIOps, and FinOps communities, continually introducing new practices and technologies to improve reliability, performance, automation, and cloud cost efficiency

This position has been classified as a hybrid role, requiring the selected candidate to typically spend 40-60% of their time collaborating and connecting face-to-face at their dedicated location. Aside from our hybrid principles, other flexible working requests will be considered from the first day of employment, including other work arrangements should you require adjustments due to a disability or long-term health condition.

About you

• A passion for Site reliability engineering and driven to understand, anticipate, and counter platform related issues before they become problems and staying up to date with the latest technological trends and developments
• Great communication allowing effective collaboration across technical leadership and various business stakeholders with the ability to present ideas and strategies clearly and persuasively.
• Demonstratable soft skills in motivating, inspiring and leading a team (direct line management is not part of the roles remit)
• Educated to degree level or equivalent and with a minimum of 5 years proven experience in a systems administration or dev-ops blended role.
• Experience implementing technologies such as Terraform, Github Actions & Containerization/Orchestration e.g. Kubernetes & Docker
• Expertise in Monitoring tools like New Relic, Grafana, Alert Manager and site24x7.
• Have extreme knowledge of cloud computing infrastructure, especially using Amazon Web Services (EKS, ECS, RDS, Route53 etc.)
• Excellent troubleshooting, debugging, communication and documentation skills
• Experience of working within an Agile product development environment.

For a detailed job description, please refer to the link at the bottom of the advert on our careers site.

We are a Disability Confident (DC) employer that is committed to equality and inclusion ensuring our recruitment process is accessible to all. The DC scheme's Offer of an Interview commitment applies to applicants who opt in, and disclose a disability or a long-term health condition, and best meet the minimum criteria for the role. In instances where interviewing all qualifying candidates is not practicable, we prioritise those who best meet the minimum criteria, as we would for applicants who do not have a disability or long-term health condition.

Cambridge University Press & Assessment is an approved UK employer for the sponsorship of eligible roles and applicants under the Skilled Worker visa route. Please refer to the gov.uk website for guidance to understand your own eligibility based on the role you are applying for.

Rewards and benefits

We will support you to be at your best in work and to live well outside of it. In addition to competitive salaries, we offer a world-class, flexible rewards package , featuring family-friendly and planet-friendly benefits including:

• 28 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Private medical and Permanent Health Insurance
• Discretionary annual bonus
• Group personal pension scheme
• Life assurance up to 4 x annual salary
• Green travel schemes

Ready to pursue your potential? Apply now.

We aim to support candidates by making our interview process clear and transparent. The closing date for all applications will be 4th February. We will review applications on an ongoing basis, and shortlisted candidates can expect interviews to take place shortly after it closes.

If you are shortlisted and progressed through the stages, you can expect:

• A 15-minute screening call with the Hiring Manager.
• Final stage virtual interview via MS Teams.

If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process due to a disability or a long-term health condition, there will be an opportunity for you to inform us via the online application form. We will do our best to accommodate your needs.

Please note that successful applicants will be subject to satisfactory background checks including DBS due to working in a regulated industry.

We are committed to an equitable recruitment process. As such, applications must be submitted via our official online application procedure. Please refrain from sending your CV directly to our recruiters. If you experience technical difficulties or require additional support with submitting your online application, contact the Recruiter.

Why join us

Joining us is your opportunity to pursue potential. You will belong to a collaborative team that is exploring new and better ways to serve students, teachers and researchers across the globe for the benefit of individuals, society and the world. Sharing our mission will inspire your own growth, development and progress, in an environment which embraces difference, change and aspiration.

Cambridge University Press & Assessment is committed to being a place where anyone can enjoy a successful career, where it is safe to speak up, and where we learn continuously to improve together. We welcome applications from all candidates, regardless of demographic characteristics (age, disability, educational attainment, ethnicity, gender, marital status, neurodiversity, religion, sex, gender identity and sexual identity), cultural, or social class/background.

We believe better outcomes come through diversity of thought, background and approach. We welcome applications from people from all backgrounds and communities, actively seeking to employ people from a wide range of different communities.

If you are ready to take the next step in your Cambridge journey, we welcome your application. Together, we continue to shape a culture where everyone feels empowered to succeed and motivated to make a difference for ourselves, for each other, and for learners worldwide.