Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Python

Help build and operate reliable, scalable and secure digital services that support businesses across the UK. The Department for Business and Trade (DBT), in partnership with Inspire People, is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer with strong software engineering capability (either experience of Python development or a desire to develop Python expertise), experience building applications hosted on cloud platforms, expertise within a modern cloud engineering environment. and a passion for automation and continuous improvement. Based from London, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham or Salford, this permanent opportunity offers hybrid working, flexible working patterns and a National salary of £63,824 to £80,158 (£67,547 to £83,778 for London) plus 29% Pension and Civil Service Benefits. Salary awarded based on technical skills assessed at interview.

Shape the Future of Cloud Engineering at DBT

The Department for Business and Trade has a clear mission: to grow the economy by helping businesses invest, grow and export, creating jobs and opportunities across the UK. DBT's Digital, Data and Technology directorate develops and operates the digital platforms and services that support this mission.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you'll join a highly skilled engineering team responsible for developing, operating and improving cloud-based platforms and services used across DBT and wider government. Working across Python development, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, observability and automation, you'll help improve reliability, developer experience and service performance while supporting critical business services used by thousands of users.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer you will:

• Build and maintain shared service products enabling developers to work more efficiently.
• 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 Site Reliability Engineering 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.
• Share knowledge and provide coaching and mentoring across the engineering community.
• Contribute to improving security, resilience and compliance practices within the platform.

• 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 on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
• Ability to build code-defined, reliable and well-tested infrastructure using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation or similar.
• 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.

In return, you can expect a flexible working culture, including:

• Flexible, hybrid working with employees typically spending 2-3 days per week in the office.
• Offices located in London, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Salford.
• Full-time, part-time and flexible working options.
• A Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%.
• Annual leave starting at 25 days, rising to 30 days with service.
• Three paid volunteering days every year.
• Learning and development tailored to your role.
• Access to professional training, certifications and technical development opportunities.
• A culture encouraging inclusion, collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Employee benefits including cycle to work and wider Civil Service benefits.

Why Join DBT?

Join a highly collaborative engineering team where you'll work across software engineering, cloud infrastructure, automation and developer enablement. You'll have the opportunity to develop new skills, gain industry certifications and contribute to modern cloud engineering challenges that support services used across government.

The team encourages experimentation, continuous learning and new ideas, giving engineers the freedom to improve services, solve complex problems and shape future platform capabilities.