Critical Cloud
Junior Site Reliability Engineer
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Critical Cloud Careers
Junior Site Reliability Engineer
Pipeline open
UK Remote / Cardiff
Full-Time
Entry–Mid Level
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Salary
£35–40k
Location
UK Remote
Stack
Datadog-native
Why Now
We're growing the customer base, building AI tooling to scale operations, and expanding across Europe. The SRE team is small and senior-heavy, real infrastructure ownership from your first week, not ticket triaging. SREs join a shared on-call rota, typically one week in five or six, reducing as the team grows. On-call weeks are paid at £500, adding roughly £5–6k a year on top of salary.
About Us
We are the world's first "Powered by Datadog" accredited MSP, a Datadog-native cloud managed service provider built for European tech-led SMBs. Our founders have scaled and exited multiple technology businesses. We operate lean, move fast, and take observability seriously.
Critical Cloud delivers cloud operations across AWS and Azure through three commercial motions: Adopt, Optimise, and Manage. We're building the dominant Datadog-native managed service brand in Europe, and we want engineers who want to grow with us.
The Role
This is a ground-floor SRE role inside a fast-moving cloud MSP. You'll work directly with our senior engineers and founders, supporting real production environments for a portfolio of tech-led customers. Expect genuine exposure to Datadog, AWS/Azure, incident response, and infrastructure automation from day one, not ticket triaging.
We're looking for someone early in their career who has the fundamentals, the curiosity to go deep, and the communication skills to work directly with customers. You don't need to know everything. You need to be the kind of engineer who figures things out.
What You'll Do
- Monitor, triage, and respond to alerts across customer AWS and Azure environments using Datadog as the primary observability platform
- Participate in on-call rotations and support incident management workflows, including contributing to postmortem documentation
- Assist with Datadog onboarding and instrumentation for new customers: infrastructure, APM, log management, dashboards, and SLOs
- Support infrastructure-as-code work (Terraform) for provisioning, configuration, and change management across customer accounts
- Write and maintain runbooks, escalation guides, and operational documentation to ISO 27001 standards
- Collaborate with senior engineers on proactive reliability improvements: capacity reviews, alert tuning, dependency mapping
- Contribute to the development of Critical Cloud's internal tooling and AI-assisted automation initiatives
- Engage directly with customers on day-to-day operational queries with a clear, professional communication style
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Tech Stack
- Datadog
Core observability platform - AWS
Primary cloud, multi-account - Azure
Secondary cloud workloads - Terraform
Infrastructure as code - Kubernetes
Container orchestration - GitHub Actions
CI/CD pipelines - PagerDuty
Incident management - Python / Bash
Automation & tooling
Career Path
We're a small team. Progression is real and fast, you won't be waiting on a committee to notice you.
- Start
Junior Site Reliability Engineer - Year 1–2
Engineer I Site Reliability - Year 2–3
Senior SRE or Platform Eng - Year 3+
Staff SRE or Lead Engineer
Requirements
Must Have
- Solid Linux fundamentals: CLI, networking, process management
- Working knowledge of at least one cloud platform (AWS or Azure)
- Comfort with scripting: Bash, Python, or similar
- Understanding of core observability concepts: metrics, logs, traces
- Clear written and verbal communication: you'll work with customers
- Right to work in the UK without sponsorship
Nice to Have
- Hands-on Datadog experience (any tier)
- Terraform or other IaC tooling
- Kubernetes or containerised workload exposure
- Experience in an MSP or multi-customer environment
- Familiarity with ISO 27001 or similar compliance frameworks
- Any cloud certification (AWS, Azure, or Datadog)
How We Work
Four principles that show up in how we operate real infrastructure for real customers.
Own the Problem
On-call means on-call. When an alert fires on your rotation, you take it through to resolution and the postmortem. We don't hand things off and hope. We solve the problem and prevent it next time.
Stay Curious
The engineers who progress fastest here ask "why" about every system they touch. Why is this alert configured this way? Why is this runbook written like this? Curiosity about the infrastructure you're operating is how you grow from operator to engineer.
Operate at Scale
We run multiple customer environments simultaneously. Everything you build has to be operable by anyone on the team, documented, consistent, maintainable. Build for the on-call engineer picking it up at 3am without context.
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Earn Trust by Delivering
Customers trust us with what's mission-critical. Every stable environment, every resolved incident, every clean service review is how we earn that trust again. Consistency is the only currency that matters here.
Compensation & Benefits
£35–40k
Base salary DOE
Remote-first
UK-based, async-friendly
Certs funded
Datadog, AWS, Azure & AI, contractual
On-call paid
~£5–6k/yr on top of salary
On-call allowance (in addition to base salary): SREs join a shared rota, typically one week in five or six, reducing as the team grows. Paid £500 per on-call week, which works out at roughly £5–6k a year on top of salary, varying with the rota size.
- 25 days holiday + bank holidays plus a paid day off in your birthday month, taken in the month it falls
- Holiday grows with tenure: +1 day per year after your second work anniversary, up to 28 days total
- Enhanced maternity pay: 26 weeks at your full basic salary
- Enhanced paternity pay: 2 weeks at your full basic salary
- Datadog, AWS, and Azure certifications paid by the company, you need these certs to do this job, and the company pays for them. Contractual obligation, not a discretionary budget.
- AI tooling certifications also funded, we're building AI-augmented operations, so staying current is part of the role
- Flexible working requests from your first day of employment, statutory right, supported in full
- Company-provided laptop and peripherals, set up before you start
- Workplace pension, auto-enrolled
Who Thrives Here
We're a small, senior-heavy team. You won't be managed closely. You'll be trusted and expected to own your work. The best fit is someone who treats production environments with respect, communicates proactively when something's wrong, and genuinely wants to understand the systems they're operating, not just keep the lights on.
We operate to ISO 27001 and take our IMS seriously. That means documentation, change control, and process discipline matter. If that sounds like constraint, this probably isn't the role. If it sounds like craft, read on.
Join the pipeline
We're not actively hiring right now, but we keep applications on file. The cover letter matters most: tell us why Critical Cloud, what draws you to reliability engineering, and what you've built or operated. No templates.
Pipeline open
Cover letter required
Direct to founders
careers@criticalcloud.ai
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