Position: VP Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Job Type: Full-time

Executive Summary

Our client, a leading banking company, is seeking a visionary and strategic leader to serve as the VP Site Reliability Engineering.

This is a foundational role within the CTO organization, responsible for establishing and shaping the Group SRE function from the ground up.

The ideal candidate is a seasoned leader with a proven track record of driving cultural transformation, enhancing operational efficiency, and ensuring the resilience of mission-critical services.

You will be a key partner to both technology and business stakeholders, focused on delivering unparalleled service quality and a culture of continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

- Strategic Leadership: Define, champion, and execute the enterprise-wide SRE strategy, aligning it with overall business objectives and technology roadmaps.

- Cultural Transformation: Lead a cultural shift towards an "automate-first" mindset across all engineering and operations teams, focusing on the elimination of manual work and redundancy.

- Operational Excellence: Establish robust methodologies to measure and improve operational efficiency and service quality.

This includes defining clear Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for critical services and ensuring accountability to these targets.

- Architectural Guidance: Lead architectural reviews with a focus on reliability, scalability, and performance.

Implement best practices in capacity planning and conduct proactive exercises to identify and eliminate potential points of failure.

- Risk Management: Drive a proactive approach to risk by leading exercises and initiatives aimed at improving resilience and ensuring business continuity.

- Process Improvement: Champion a culture of continuous learning by leading post-incident reviews and ensuring that key learnings are translated into meaningful and lasting improvements to systems and processes.

- Mentorship & Influence: Provide strong leadership and mentorship to SRE teams, while also influencing cross-functional teams to adopt modern engineering and deployment practices that prioritize reliability and automation.

Required Experience & Attributes

- A proven track record of building, leading, and mentoring high-performing SRE or similar engineering teams within a large, complex organization.

- Demonstrated success in defining and meeting service reliability targets and managing to Error Budgets to ensure a consistent customer experience.

- A deep, conceptual understanding of SRE principles, infrastructure as code, and modern observability practices, with the ability to articulate their value to both technical and non-technical leaders.

- Extensive experience working with and influencing large teams across a complex technology landscape, including both public cloud and on-premises environments.

- Exceptional analytical, communication, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to drive change and build consensus across the organization