Senior Engineering Manager - SRE

Why you will love this opportunity as Senior Engineering Manager at Civica

As Senior Engineering Manager for LiveOps and SRE, you will lead and evolve Civica's LiveOps function; the teams that ensure our critical SaaS and cloud environments remain reliable, observable, and secure every day.

You will use your leadership and technical expertise to guide multiple LiveOps teams in modern operational practices, automation, and proactive incident response.

Working closely with our SRE, Platform, Security, and Product Engineering peers you'll ensure Civica's cloud operations deliver the resilience and performance our customers depend on.

You will play a key role in shaping Civica's long term reliability and cloud strategy, helping us transition from legacy operations to a modern, scalable, cloud native operating model.

This is a role for a transformational leader who thrives on driving operational excellence, developing people, and building the systems and culture that keep essential public services running around the clock.

What will you do to be successful in this role

• Lead and grow high performing LiveOps teams across Civica's SaaS products, fostering accountability, curiosity, and continuous improvement.
• Build trusted relationships with senior leaders, product owners, and customer facing teams to align reliability priorities and communicate service health.
• Drive operational excellence: strengthen incident response, on call readiness, and problem management through automation, runbooks, and blameless post mortems.
• Define and embed reliability metrics (SLIs/SLOs, MTTR, change success rate) to measure and improve service health across multiple platforms.
• Collaborate closely with SRE, Platform, and Development teams to enhance observability and release resilience, leveraging shared tooling such as Grafana, Datadog, and Prometheus.
• Own the roadmap for operational maturity, ensuring prioritisation of reliability work, resourcing, and long term capability building.
• Champion automation first operations: evolve our IaC, CI/CD, and configuration management practices (Terraform, GitHub Actions, Ansible, Packer, Kubernetes).
• Partner with Product and Security leaders to ensure uptime, compliance, and auditability (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI).
• Provide executive level leadership during major incidents, ensuring clear communication, structured response, and fast mitigation.
• Build clear communication pathways across Engineering, LiveOps, and Support by ensuring incidents, root causes, and learnings are transparent and acted upon.
• Coach and mentor LiveOps engineers and managers, creating pathways for growth, clarity in ownership, and alignment with Civica's engineering culture.
• Lead through data: establish and monitor key operational KPIs to guide decision making and prioritise reliability improvements.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading LiveOps, Cloud Operations, or SRE aligned teams in a SaaS or multi product environment.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and automation (Azure, AWS, VMware hybrid), and experience improving service availability and performance.
• Skilled in modern observability and incident management practices, including monitoring, tracing, and proactive alerting.
• Deep experience defining, implementing, and tracking SLIs/SLOs and service level metrics that reflect real user experience and guide reliability improvements.
• Proven ability to design and evolve highly available architectures, with a history of improving uptime, cost efficiency, and working effectively with FinOps or business teams.
• Track record of transforming teams from manual, reactive operations to automation led, data driven reliability practices.
• Strong software engineering knowledge, including system design, application architecture, and lifecycle management, with the ability to steer technical decisions that improve resilience and performance.
• Excellent communicator who builds alignment across technical and non technical stakeholders (Engineering, Security, Product, Support).
• Strong mentoring and coaching ability; you build capable, confident teams grounded in psychological safety and ownership.
• Comfortable leading through complexity and ambiguity, balancing short term operational priorities with long term reliability strategy.
• Hands on experience designing or implementing production grade reliability tooling, resilience features, or system automation that improves operational effectiveness.

Nice to have

• Experience with large scale multi tenant SaaS or hybrid cloud migrations.
• Familiarity with observability ecosystems (Grafana, Datadog, ELK, Prometheus).
• Awareness of ITIL or incident command frameworks adapted for modern SRE cultures.
• Experience working with distributed global teams.

We Want You to Bring Your Whole Self to Work

There is no such thing as the perfect candidate, so if you think you have what it takes but don't necessarily meet every single point on the list above, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.

Whyyou will love it here

As a company, we're passionate about what we do and the citizens we serve. If you too want to champion the use of technology in public services to improve outcomes for citizens and public sector organisations, then Civica is the right place for you. We will help you unlock the best version of yourself, achieve career growth, and make a real difference to people and communities.

Time Off & Work Life Balance

• 25 Days Annual Leave + bank holidays - plus the option to buy up to 10 extra days!
• Days of Difference - Up to 3 extra days off for volunteering.

Financial Well being & Security

• Pension Contributions - 5% employer match to support your future.
• Income Protection - Up to 75% salary cover for long term illness.
• Life Assurance - 4x salary tax free lump sum.
• Critical Illness Cover - £25,000 lump sum (extendable to dependants).

Health & Perks

• Private Medical Insurance - Fast access to private healthcare.
• Health Cash Plan - Claim back physio, therapies & more.
• Dental Insurance - Cover for routine & emergency care.
• Electric Vehicle (EV) Scheme - A wide range of electric & hybrid vehicles.
• Affinity Groups - Join employee led communities.
• Bounty Bonus - Refer a friend & get rewarded.

Equality, diversity, and inclusion

At Civica, we are committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace where everyone feels valued and supported. We believe a variety of perspectives drives innovation and excellence, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds, cultures, and experiences.

Equal opportunity employer statement

We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other legally protected characteristic. Our recruitment process is designed to ensure fairness and transparency, so every candidate has an equal chance to contribute to our mission.

Accommodations

If you need any adjustments or accommodations to participate in our recruitment process, please let us know. We are here to support you.