Principal SRE

Octopus need a Principal-level SRE to anchor the reliability and platform engineering across their growing technical estate. This is the most senior IC role in their platform organisation, reporting to the Head of Platform, with cross-cutting influence across the firm’s customer-facing and operational systems.

The realistic shape of the work: thirty percent firefighting the incidents and gnarliness that comes with running infrastructure at the scale of eight million customers; thirty percent setting standards and platform abstractions that the broader engineering organisation actually wants to use; thirty percent coaching senior engineers across other teams; ten percent the unglamorous internal work that makes large engineering organisations functional.

Stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, observability you can actually use, internal tooling that’s been thoughtfully built rather than copy-pasted from a conference talk. The platform team has been intentional about its abstractions in a way that’s increasingly rare.

You’re a fit if: you’ve been a Principal or Staff SRE at a business with non-trivial reliability requirements. You’re equally comfortable in an incident post-mortem and in a budget conversation. You’ve operated under regulatory or audit pressure (gas/electricity supply has real consequences for missing things).

£200-240k + RSUs, hybrid, three days in central London. Lead consultant: Sam Okafor.