Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Barclays is seeking a motivated and experienced Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join their dynamic team in Knutsford. This is an exceptional opportunity for an individual passionate about building and enhancing robust software solutions that underpin critical business, platform, and technology functions for Barclays' customers and colleagues.

This role offers a chance to contribute significantly to the reliability and performance of large-scale systems within a leading financial institution. If you are looking to deepen your expertise in SRE principles and drive impactful improvements, this position warrants your serious consideration.

Key Advantages for Candidates:

• Impactful Work: You will be directly involved in designing, developing, and improving software that is vital to Barclays' operations, offering a tangible sense of contribution and achievement.
• Technological Breadth: The role encompasses a wide array of modern technologies and practices, including Kubernetes/OpenShift, AWS platforms (Lambda, EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM), and a strong emphasis on observability and automation. This provides a fertile ground for continuous learning and skill enhancement.
• Career Growth & Development: Barclays fosters a culture of technical excellence and growth. You'll have opportunities to stay informed about industry trends, contribute to communities of practice, and potentially take on leadership responsibilities or guide collaborative assignments.
• Focus on Reliability: A core tenet of this role is ensuring platform resiliency, capacity management, and effective incident response. This allows you to hone your skills in critical areas of modern software engineering.
• Collaborative Environment: You will work cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and fellow engineers, fostering a collaborative spirit and promoting knowledge sharing through code reviews and team initiatives.
• Strong Engineering Practices: The role emphasizes secure coding, unit testing, and the development of scalable, maintainable, and performant code, aligning with best-in-class software engineering methodologies.

Key Considerations for Your Career Path:

• Experience in Core SRE Areas: Candidates should possess a solid foundation in:
  • Platform resiliency and capacity management for clusters and platforms (Kubernetes/OpenShift), including practical experience with SLOs, error budgets, autoscaling, quotas, node pools, and capacity planning.
  • AWS platforms, with a specific focus on Lambda, cost optimization, and resource management across services like EKS, EC2, VPC, and IAM. Familiarity with AWS budgets and scaling policies is crucial.
  • Observability and incident response, including monitoring, alerting, tracing, on-call rotations, and conducting thorough postmortems. Proficiency in Python or Shell for developing runbooks and auto-remediation scripts is highly valued.
• Advantageous Skills: While not strictly mandatory, candidates with experience in performance and load engineering, chaos/DR testing, reliability patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries/backoff), and FinOps tooling will find themselves particularly well-positioned.
• Broader Skillset Assessment: Beyond technical proficiency, you may be assessed on critical skills such as risk and controls management, change and transformation aptitude, business acumen, strategic thinking, and digital and technology understanding.
• Potential for Leadership: For Assistant Vice President expectations, the role may involve leading teams, advising on policy, and influencing decision-making. Candidates aspiring to leadership roles should be prepared to demonstrate strong leadership behaviors and a commitment to developing others. For individual contributors, the expectation is to lead collaborative assignments and guide team members effectively.
• Barclays Values and Mindset: A strong alignment with Barclays' values (Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, Stewardship) and mindset (Empower, Challenge, Drive) is expected. This indicates a commitment to ethical conduct and a proactive approach to work.

This Site Reliability Engineer position at Barclays in Knutsford presents a compelling opportunity for seasoned professionals to make a significant impact in a technically challenging and growth-oriented environment. If you are ready to elevate your SRE career and contribute to a resilient and innovative technology landscape, this role is an excellent stepping stone.