Head of Performance & Reliability Engineering
Full-Time – Hybrid (3 days in Cambridgeshire)
Up to £95,000 + Bonus
This is an exceptional opportunity to join a major organisation at a pivotal stage in their digital transformation. As Head of Performance & Reliability Engineering
You’ll shape strategy, lead performance testing and chaos engineering initiatives, and embed reliability best practices across engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure teams. This is a senior, strategic leadership role focused on system excellence, observability, and continuous improvement.
Ideal Candidate:
* Proven experience leading Performance Engineering, Reliability, or SRE functions
* Deep expertise in performance testing methodologies (load, stress, spike, soak)
* Strong hands-on background with LoadRunner and Dynatrace (plus tools such as NeoLoad, k6, or JMeter)
* Skilled in chaos engineering, resilience testing, and system scalability
* Experience defining and managing SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets
* Strong knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and microservice architectures
* Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and embed performance and reliability into the SDLC
* Inspirational leader with experience building, mentoring, and enabling high-performing engineering team
What’s on Offer?
* 33 days holiday (plus bank holidays)
* Private health cover option
* 6% matched pension contributions
* Funded professional qualifications and L&D opportunities
* Life event loan up to £3,000
* Discounts on insurance & breakdown cover
About the Role:
* Lead the performance and reliability strategy across critical platforms and services
* Oversee load, stress, and chaos testing initiatives to ensure systems perform and recover under real-world conditions
* Define and drive best practices for observability, monitoring, and APM adoption using tools like Dynatrace
* Drive incident reduction, faster recovery (MTTR), and continuous reliability improvements
* Champion a culture of performance ownership, ensuring teams build with scalability, stability, and efficiency in mind
* Influence technology direction through deep technical insight and strong stakeholder engagements