Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Python

Job summary

If you would like to find out more about the role, the SRE team and what it’s like to work at BIST, we are holding a Hiring Manager Q&A session for this role where you can virtually 'meet the team' on Tuesday 8th September at 12:30pm. Please click here to book your spot.

About us

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) helps businesses invest, innovate, export and grow across the UK. Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) helps deliver this by designing, building and running the services, platforms and technology that businesses and colleagues rely on every day.

Our teams work on a wide range of services and technologies, including:

• digital services that help businesses access government support, guidance and opportunities
• data and AI products that support decision making and enable innovation
• internal tools and services that help colleagues work more effectively
• secure technology and platforms that support critical government services
• cyber security services that protect systems, data and users

By joining DDaT, you'll work on services used by businesses, colleagues and citizens across the UK. You'll be part of multidisciplinary teams focused on improving services, solving complex problems and delivering better outcomes for users.

We are committed to creating an inclusive and supportive workplace. In recognition of this, we were named Best Public Sector Employer at the Women in Tech Employer Awards 2025!

About the role

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (DevOps), you will play a key role in designing, building and running reliable, scalable and secure platform services that underpin critical BIST digital products. Working in multidisciplinary, agile teams, you’ll help ensure development teams have the tools and support they need, from observability and monitoring through to CI/CD pipelines so services are resilient, performant and centred around user needs. You’ll champion good engineering practices, helping teams use data and insight to continuously improve how services are delivered and operated.

This is a hands-on role where you’ll spend much of your time building and improving platform capabilities directly. You’ll work closely with product managers, architects and engineers to improve reliability and reduce operational burden, while also supporting and mentoring others across the engineering community. You’ll contribute to building and scaling our global platform, support live services through an on-call rota, and play an active role in initiatives such as enhancing observability and streamlining deployment processes to improve service quality and delivery outcomes.

Job description

You will:

• Build and maintain shared service products enabling developers to be more efficient.

• Write clean, maintainable and well-tested code to support platform and tooling development.

• Work closely with development teams to provide and improve platform tooling, including monitoring, logging, metrics, dashboards and CI/CD pipelines.

• Build, maintain and improve reliable, secure and scalable cloud-based infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches.

• Support teams to adopt SRE practices, including Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets.

• Contribute to observability across services, helping teams better understand performance, reliability and user impact.

• Develop and improve CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, frequent and low-risk delivery of changes.

• Collaborate with product, delivery and architecture colleagues to ensure platform services meet user and business needs.

• Support live service operations, including incident response, troubleshooting and problem management, with a focus on learning and continuous improvement.

• Share knowledge and provide coaching and mentoring to colleagues, contributing to a supportive and inclusive engineering community.

• Contribute to improving security, resilience and compliance practices within the platform.

What tech will you be using?

• Python and Django framework

• PostgreSQL as a service (Amazon RDS)

• Redis/Elasticache

• AWS and Azure

• GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipelines/CodeBuild

• Terraform

• Docker, Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

• ElasticSearch/OpenSearch

• Datadog and Logstash

Person specification

It is essential that you have:

• Experience writing clean, maintainable code in at least one programming language.

• Experience designing, operating and improving distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user impact.

• Experience of building applications hosted in a containerised environment.

• Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals and TCP/IP networking.

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to build effective working relationships with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Benefits

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

As part of the application process you will be asked to upload a 2-page CV which outlines your experience, skills and fit for the role, and go through a multi-stage screening process. If you’re longlisted, you’ll be asked to complete a short, pre-recorded video screening interview (alternately you can provide written answers to questions). Inspire People will assess your full application against the essential criteria listed above to compile a shortlist of applications, which will th