Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Life can sometimes be unpredictable, and it pays to plan ahead. Our aim at Legal & General Retail is to help our customers plan for the unexpected, achieve financial security for their tomorrow, and protect everything that’s important to them. To better understand our customers and meet their needs, we’ve brought our protection, retirement income, savings, lending, and advice, fintech and mortgage businesses under one umbrella. Created at the start of 2022 through the merging of our long-standing and trusted retail retirement and insurance businesses, we’re a fast-growing division with big, customer-centred ambitions.  

We have an exciting new opportunity for a seasoned Site Reliability Engineer who will work alongside the development, architecture and service management teams. The SRE champions proactive measures and automation to pre-empt disruptions and optimize system performance. This role is instrumental in bridging the gap between development and operations, applying engineering principles to operational challenges to drive continuous improvement and innovation.

What you'll be doing:

• Leading the enhancement of system reliability and scalability, architecting robust solutions that meet the dynamic needs of the business while ensuring security and architectural excellence.
• Responsible for facilitating technical roadmaps by ensuring all non-functional designs and patterns are implemented in all projects across the board for the delivery of quality technical deliverables. Ensuring that this is aligned with core technology strategy and reduces or mitigates technical debt.   
• Responsible for facilitating technical roadmaps by ensuring all non-functional designs and patterns are implemented in all projects across the board for the delivery of quality technical deliverables. Ensuring that this is aligned with core technology strategy and reduces or mitigates technical debt.
• Management of application & development environments across a mixture of physical and cloud-based environments in order to improve throughput and velocity of software development lifecycle.
• Developing core platforms both within Cloud and on prem mainframes as well as working on fixes and improvements of pre-existing setup, utilising shared tools, libraries and platforms, to support our production.
• Working closely with the Infrastructure, DevOps and Development teams to promote the increase of automation and maturity across the development pipeline for the division, increasing the velocity of change.
• Management of continuous integration environments and helping support pipeline tools such as Github Actions, Veracode to ensure quality outcomes of change.
• Acting as the ‘change lead’ for DevOps, quality assurance practice implementation and project initiatives. Educating and sharing knowledge to team members to enable them to effectively contribute to backlog items related to infrastructure provisioning, monitoring and best practice.
• Considering the needs of the particular target markets (end users) for products and tailor the service proposition to meet those needs effectively. 

Who we're looking for:

• AWS certification (e.g. AWS Solutions Architect Associate or Professional) or other industry certification is beneficial and desired.

• Has significant experience in DevOps, SRE implementation and in evolving practices and ways of working through multi-disciplinary teams, business frameworks and culture. 

• Advanced knowledge and hands-on experience with cloud platforms and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings, preferably Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure.

• Strong and proven Java skills 

• Linux and networking fundamentals

• Experience of containerisation, ideally using Docker, Kubernetes 

• Solid understanding of the processes involved in release, integration, and deployment, along with an awareness of the promotion pathways within these processes.

• Expertise in observability principles and practices, encompassing monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems to ensure transparency and actionable insights into system performance and health. Tools Dynatrace, Datadog

• Familiarity with addressing performance and optimization issues, with a demonstrated capability in diagnosing and resolving such problems efficiently.

• Experience across the entire stack: hardware, application and network.

Whatever your role, we reward performance and behaviour with a package that looks after all the things that are important to you. Here are some of the benefits we offer: 

• The opportunity to participate in our annual, performance-related bonus plan and valuable share schemes  
• Generous pension contribution  
• Life assurance   
• Private medical insurance (permanent employees only) 
• At least 25 days holiday, plus public holidays, 26 days after 2 years’ service. There’s also the option to buy and sell holiday 
• Competitive family leave 
• Participate in our electric car scheme, which offers employees the option to hire a brand-new electric car through tax efficient salary sacrifice 
• There are the many discounts we offer – both for our own products and at a range of high street stores and online   
• In 2023, some of our workspaces were redesigned. Our offices are great spaces to connect and collaborate and have your wellbeing at the heart

Legal & General is a leading financial services group and major global investor, named Britain’s Most Admired Company in 2023, for the second year running. Rated top in our sector and top for inspirational leadership, we have a strong heritage and an exciting future.

We aim to build a better society for the long term by investing our customers’ money in things that make life better for everyone.

If you join us, you’ll be part of a welcoming culture, with opportunities to collaborate with people of diverse backgrounds, views and experiences. Guided by leaders with integrity who care about your future and wellbeing. Empowered through initiatives which support people to develop their careers and excel.

We strive to be open, mindful and inclusive, so are always willing to discussing flexible working arrangements and reasonable accommodations for candidates with specific needs.

If you’re open to find out more, we'd love to hear from you.