British Council
Lead Site Reliability Engineer (AWS)
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Role Summary
As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you will play a key role in ensuring the reliability, availability, and operational excellence of the British Council's global digital platforms. With a strong specialism in AWS, along with demonstrable experience, you will work closely with engineering teams, architects, senior stakeholders, and our managed service partner, you will design, implement, and continuously improve resilient, scalable, and secure systems. You will leverage expertise in cloud infrastructure, automation, monitoring, performance optimisation, and incident management to deliver high system uptime and support evolving business needs.
About the Team
The role sits within the Digital and Technology Engineering team, which partners across the British Council to deliver customer-centric digital products and services. The Engineering function brings together Architecture, Software Engineering, Quality Assurance, and Delivery capabilities to build and maintain world-class digital solutions. Guided by the values of being Open and Committed, Optimistic and Bold, and Expert and Inclusive, the team champions collaboration, innovation, digital inclusion, and engineering best practices to create reliable, high-performing technology that enhances the experience of customers and colleagues worldwide.
Main responsibilities
- Contribute to shaping and delivering the British Council's Site Reliability / DevOps strategy by implementing best practices that improve the availability, resilience, security, and performance of our digital platforms.
- Use your expertise in cloud infrastructure, automation, monitoring, FinOps and performance optimisation to identify opportunities for improvement, resolve complex reliability challenges, and ensure systems remain scalable and highly available.
- Leverage system metrics, user feedback, and data analytics to drive continuous improvement while promoting inclusive, user-centric digital experiences.
- Build strong cross-functional relationships, advocate for Site Reliability Engineering across the organisation, and collaborate with teams to define performance expectations and deliver robust solutions.
- Mentor fellow engineers to build up their AWS expertise, have involvement with Azure responsibilities where required, contribute to the Site Reliability Engineering community of practice, share knowledge and best practices, and foster a culture of collaboration, continuous learning, and operational excellence.
Role specific skills
Technical:
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- Cloud Expertise: Expertise with major cloud platforms, specifically AWS, but ideally also Microsoft Azure.
- Infrastructure Automation: Excellent working knowledge using tools like Terraform or Ansible to automate infrastructure tasks.
- Containerisation and Orchestration: Knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for application deployment and management.
- Monitoring and Observability: Experience with tools such as Azure Monitor, ELK stack, or similar to monitor system health, analyse logs, and troubleshoot production issues.
- Programming, Scripting and Infrastructure as Code: Ability to write and maintain scripts in languages like Python or Typescript for automation and Terraform for IaC.
- Networking: Understanding of load balancers, DNS setups, and basic network security practices.
- Database Management: Experience in managing and optimising relational and NoSQL databases.
- SLIs, SLOs, SLAs: Familiarity with setting and monitoring service level metrics to maintain system reliability.
Soft Skills:
- Problem-solving: Ability to quickly diagnose and resolve system-related issues.
- Communication: Articulating technical information effectively to varied audiences.
- Collaboration: Working closely with developers, other SREs, and technical teams to ensure system robustness.
Leadership:
- Operational Management: Overseeing daily operations, ensuring processes are adhered to, and optimizing workflows.
- Mentoring: Sharing skills and expertise with the wider SRE team.
- Teamwork: Actively contributing to team meetings, discussions, and brainstorming sessions, sharing knowledge and best practices.
Desirable Skills:
- Chaos Engineering: Some exposure to chaos engineering practices to test system resilience.
- Performance Tuning: Techniques and best practices for optimizing system performance.
- Disaster Recovery: Crafting and executing strategies to quickly recover from system failures.
Role specific knowledge and experience
Minimum/essential
- Extensive hands-on experience designing and operating production AWS platforms.
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional or AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (both preferred).
- Proven Experience in roles like Systems Administrator, Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, or a mid-to-senior Site Reliability Engineer position.
- Leadership: 5+ years in an engineering role, guiding and mentoring junior engineers.
- Production Systems: Hands-on experience with supporting and scaling high-traffic, production-grade systems.
- System Design Principles: Solid grasp of system and design principles to create scalable and resilient systems that meet current business needs.
- Incident Handling: Demonstrated ability to efficiently handle and resolve critical incidents, ensuring minimized downtime and impact.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: A history of working closely with product, development, QA, and operations teams to bolster system reliability.
- Problem Solving: Strong diagnostic and troubleshooting skills, especially in a high-pressure environment.
- Automated Testing: Knowledge of automated testing methodologies and tools to ensure the reliability of infrastructure as code deployments.
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Desirable
- AWS Certified Security – Specialty
- AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty
- Kubernetes certification (CKA)
- Terraform Associate certification
- Strategic thinking: Ability to think strategically and align design initiatives with overall business goals, considering market trends, user insights, and competitive landscape.
- Design-First Approach: History of employing a design-first methodology, ensuring systems are not only reliable but also efficient, maintainable, and scalable.
- Systems Thinking: Proficiency in perceiving and addressing infrastructure holistically, understanding the interrelationships and dependencies between components to predict and mitigate cascading failures.
Language Requirements
The British Council systems and global processes operate in English. Written and verbal proficiency in English is required.
Education
Master’s degree in design or related field offering advanced knowledge and specialisation in areas such as user experience (UX) design, interaction design, or information design.
British Council | Pay Band 9
- Location: All British Council offices in the UK (London, Belfast, Cardiff, and Edinburgh)
- Department: Digital and Technology
- Contract: Indefinite Contract
- Apply by: Tuesday, Aug 11th (23:59 local time)
Please note that candidates must have the pre-existing, legal right to work in the UK at the time of application. Mobility / relocation / visa sponsoring support will not be provided. British Council supports working in new ways such as hybrid working, subject to full approval by line management and conditional upon our ability to provide the appropriate level of service. This may not be appropriate for all roles but can be explored at interview.
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