Lead SRE / Observability Engineering Lead - Outside IR35

Lead SRE / Observability Engineering Lead - (Outside IR35 Contract / Remote)

• Location: Bristol / London HQ - Largely Remote (Occasional Travel)
• Day Rate: Outside IR35 - £650 to £750 p/d
• Duration: 3-6 Months Initial - with intention to extend
• Payment Terms: Monthly

Our client is a FTSE100 Wealth/Asset Management firm seeking to engage a Lead SRE Engineer (Observability SME) to support the implementation and instrumentation of their new Observability solution.

This role will be critical in delivering against our Digital OKRs by embedding observability best practices, frameworks, and tooling across digital platforms and engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities:

• Strategy & Roadmap: Define and drive the observability roadmap in alignment with business priorities and digital platform objectives. Champion observability-by-design standards across the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
• Reliability & Performance: Establish and manage SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets to track and improve system reliability. Support capacity and availability planning through real-time telemetry and predictive analytics.
• Instrumentation & Runbooks: Design and implement observability runbooks covering metrics, logs, traces, synthetics, and customer journey monitoring. Set standards for instrumentation, dashboards, alerting, and enable teams to self-serve their system metrics and traces.
• Implementation & Enablement: Assist digital engineering teams in implementing synthetic monitoring, health checks, observable CI/CD pipelines, distributed tracing, and cloud-native monitoring patterns. Partner with SRE, DevOps, and engineering teams to embed observability into digital platforms and services.
• Collaboration & Culture: Promote a culture of data-driven decision-making and operational excellence. Drive adoption of observability best practices, standards, and governance across teams.

Technical Expertise

Core Experience: 10+ years in engineering roles, with at least 5 years in SRE, Observability, or DevOps functions.Proven track record implementing observability solutions in cloud-native environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

• Hands-on proficiency with observability tools such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience with automation and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with performance engineering, capacity planning, resilience testing, and telemetry-based insights.
• Experience supporting cloud-native platforms and modern application architectures.
• Proficiency in programming and scripting languages such as Python or Go.
• Experience building and managing enterprise-grade observability solutions.
• Strong understanding of secrets management, RBAC, audit logging, compliance, and secure infrastructure practices.

Reasonable Adjustments:

Respect and equality are core values to us. We are proud of the diverse and inclusive community we have built, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and perspectives. Our success is driven by our people, united by the spirit of partnership to deliver the best resourcing solutions for our clients.

If you need any help or adjustments during the recruitment process for any reason, please let us know when you apply or talk to the recruiters directly so we can support you.