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Are you passionate about reliability engineering and ready to lead the evolution of cloud-scale operations at a world-class institution?
Join The Open University as a Lead Engineer, SRE and help shape the future of resilient, automated, and observable platforms that power learning for millions.
About the Role
As a Lead Engineer, SRE at The Open University, you will be a key driver of reliability, scalability, and operational excellence across our platforms and services. This role goes beyond traditional operations—you will help shape how we design, build, deploy, and run systems in production, applying both a software engineering mindset and deep cloud expertise.
Your primary focus will be on Microsoft Azure, where you will architect and manage resilient cloud infrastructure, implement automation at scale, and integrate observability into all our deliverables. By partnering with architects, software engineers, and product teams, you will ensure our systems meet the highest standards of performance, security, and cost efficiency while remaining easy to operate.
In this senior role, you will:
* Drive the adoption of SRE practices such as SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and blameless post‑mortems to improve system reliability.
* Embed automation and self‑healing mechanisms to reduce manual toil and accelerate recovery from failures.
* Champion infrastructure as code (IaC) using Bicep, ensuring consistent, repeatable, and compliant environments.
* Build out end‑to‑end observability, enabling proactive issue detection and actionable insights into system health.
* Partner with engineering leadership to shape the technical roadmap, guiding investments in scalability, resilience, and DevOps culture.
This role also carries a strong mentorship and leadership component. You will coach engineers across teams, advocate for best practices, and foster a build‑run‑own mindset that elevates operational maturity.
We are seeking an individual who excels in complex, hybrid environments—encompassing on‑premises, cloud‑native, and multi‑cloud (Azure, AWS) platforms—and can effectively balance tactical problem‑solving with strategic foresight. The ideal candidate will be passionate about automation, resilience engineering, and cloud‑scale operations, with the ambition to make a lasting impact on how services are delivered and operated.
Key Responsibilities
* Reliability & Performance: Ensure critical systems and applications are highly available, fault‑tolerant, and performant. Implement SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs to measure and drive service reliability. Conduct capacity planning, performance tuning, and chaos engineering exercises to validate system resilience.
* Cloud Platform Ownership: Design, build, and manage scalable infrastructure on Azure, leveraging services such as App Services, Functions, Service Bus, Front Door, Azure SQL and Event Hub. Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Bicep and Terraform to standardise deployments. Optimise cloud cost efficiency (FinOps) while ensuring stability and performance.
* Automation & Operations: Automate operational tasks using PowerShell, Bash, or Python. Enhance CI/CD pipelines to accelerate deployments and reduce production risks. Lead efforts to minimise toil by building self‑healing and auto‑scaling systems.
* Observability & Incident Management: Implement robust monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions (e.g., Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Splunk). Lead incident response and post‑mortem reviews, identifying root causes and driving long‑term fixes. Establish operational runbooks and playbooks to facilitate the rapid resolution of incidents.
* Security & Compliance: Embed security‑by‑design practices in infrastructure and pipelines. Ensure compliance with relevant standards through proactive monitoring and automation. Collaborate with security teams to manage vulnerability assessments and remediation efforts.
* Collaboration & Leadership: Act as a trusted advisor to engineering teams on scalability, reliability, and operational excellence. Mentor engineers in SRE practices, cloud engineering, and automation tooling. Contribute to the engineering community by sharing best practices and driving the adoption of SRE principles across teams.
About You
* Strong technical leadership in software and systems development, with a proven track record of delivering high‑quality solutions on time.
* Excellent people management and mentoring skills, with the ability to inspire and grow engineering teams.
* Proven Cloud Expertise: Azure services (Compute, Networking, Storage, AKS, Azure DevOps).
* Expert in systems architecture and designing scalable, reliable software solutions with deep expertise in cloud services, microservices, and distributed systems.
* Infrastructure as Code: Strong knowledge of Bicep.
* Automation: Proficiency in scripting (C#, PowerShell, Bash, Python).
* DevOps & CI/CD: Experience integrating reliability practices into pipelines (Azure DevOps).
* Observability Tools: Monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing (Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana, App Insights).
* Resilience Engineering: Disaster recovery, failover design, chaos testing, performance optimisation.
* Networking & Security: Networking, identity, access management, and security compliance in cloud environments.
* Software Engineering Background: Ability to read, review, and contribute to codebases (C#, Python, or other modern languages).
* SRE Mindset: Familiarity with budgets, SLOs, SLIs, toil reduction, and blameless post‑mortems.
* Leadership: Demonstrated ability to mentor teams, influence stakeholders, and drive cultural change toward SRE practices.
* Stakeholder relationship management, with a strong ability to communicate technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders and manage expectations.
Behaviours
* Leadership and Ownership: You take full ownership of your work and lead by example.
* Collaboration: You are a team player, a proactive communicator who works effectively across functions and departments.
* Problem‑Solving: You diagnose complex problems and offer practical, innovative solutions.
* Adaptability: Embrace change and thrive on learning new technologies and methodologies.
* Strategic Thinking: Always looking for ways to improve processes, systems, and technology to achieve long‑term success.
Why Join The Open University?
At The Open University, we’re proud to be pioneers in accessible education and digital innovation. This is your opportunity to lead transformative reliability initiatives and make a lasting impact on our students and staff.
Benefits
* 33 days annual leave, on top of bank holidays and a three-day Christmas closure period.
* Access to a leading pension scheme for UK higher education with generous employer contributions.
* Staff Fee Waivers for OU study, meaning you could earn a degree for free.
* Hybrid working, with limited requirement to attend the office in‑person, with agile working and family friendly policies.
* Discounts, wellbeing support, and development opportunities.
Seniority level
* Mid‑Senior level
Employment type
* Full‑time
Job function
* Engineering and Information Technology
Industries
* Higher Education
Location
Milton Keynes, England, United Kingdom
Ready to make an impact?
Apply now and help us build resilient, automated platforms that power the next generation of learning at one of the UK’s most respected institutions.
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