Team Leader, SRE

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Team Leader, SRE based in United Kingdom. As Team Leader, SRE, you’ll lead a highly technical Site Reliability Engineering team responsible for the reliability of critical cloud infrastructure and developer platforms. The role combines approximately 60% hands-on technical contribution with 40% people leadership, giving you meaningful influence over both engineering direction and team development. You’ll work across Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, CI infrastructure, observability, security, and reliability practices. You’ll help evolve a growing SRE function, strengthening SLOs, incident response, on-call practices, and operational excellence. At the same time, you’ll own the career development, performance, hiring, and overall health of your team. The environment is fully remote and asynchronous, requiring strong written communication, autonomy, and thoughtful prioritization. This is an opportunity to shape reliability practices while remaining close enough to the technology to guide decisions and lead through complex incidents. Accountabilities - Lead and develop an SRE team, owning the full career lifecycle of direct reports, including onboarding, feedback, performance management, progression, and hiring. - Coach engineers on both technical craft and interpersonal skills, creating clear opportunities for growth and development. - Foster a healthy, collaborative team environment by understanding team dynamics, addressing conflicts constructively, and maintaining effective retrospective practices. - Represent the SRE team across engineering and with senior leadership, communicating priorities, challenges, progress, and technical direction. - Define and prioritize SRE objectives, balancing operational commitments with project delivery and protecting the team's focus.

- Own the support rotation and on-call model, ensuring sustainable operational coverage and effective incident response. - Provide technical leadership across core infrastructure, including Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, DNS, TLS, CI infrastructure, and related platform services. - Drive the evolution of reliability practices, including Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, incident management, observability, and post-incident improvements. - Partner with Security teams on infrastructure threats, patching, security controls, audits, and compliance requirements. - Oversee infrastructure-related vendor relationships, including renewals and commercial discussions in collaboration with senior leadership. - Stay hands-on enough to review technical work, challenge architectural decisions, contribute to complex problems, and provide credible technical direction during incidents. - Help mature the organization's reliability practices by identifying operational gaps and turning lessons from incidents into lasting engineering improvements. - Balance short-term operational demands with longer-term platform investments and engineering goals. Requirements: - Proven experience leading an SRE, infrastructure, platform, or DevOps engineering team, with direct responsibility for team members' growth, performance, and career progression. - Strong people-management and coaching skills, with demonstrated ability to develop engineers and provide clear, constructive feedback. - Experience hiring engineers and assessing both technical capability and broader engineering judgment. - Strong conflict-resolution and team-dynamics skills, with the ability to build commitment around shared organizational goals. - Deep hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, or a closely related discipline. - Production experience with Kubernetes, including operational troubleshooting, reliability, scaling, and real-world failure scenarios.