Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Python) - Department for Business and Trade - G7

Location

Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Salford

About the job

Job summary

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission - to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways.

Firstly, we help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.

Secondly, we open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains. This can be through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.

Finally, we work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advance, finance and deal-making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission.

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 DBT 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 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.