Site Reliability Engineer

Role Title: Site Reliability Engineer

Location: Milton Keynes/Hybrid (3 days on site)

Duration: 6 months contract

Rate: £390 per day inside ir35

Role Description:

Join a leading global IT consultancy and digital transformation organisation at the forefront of cloud, automation and secure platform engineering. We're looking for a Kubernetes-first engineer who wants to own and evolve a modern, enterprise-scale platform spanning AWS, Azure and on-prem. This is a hands-on role with real influence over reliability, security and architecture.

Responsibilities:

• Operate and enhance our Kubernetes platform across AWS, Azure, and on prem.
• Lead incident response, problem management, and root cause analysis.
• Deliver cluster life cycle work: upgrades, patching, node pools, CNI/CSI, ingress, and Rancher operations.
• Own observability, dashboards, alerting, and SLOs/SLIs.
• Implement GitOps (Fleet) and reduce toil through automation and strong governance.
• Apply secure API gateway and WAF patterns.
• Work with distributed system patterns, including event brokers and asynchronous messaging.
• Maintain security posture: CVE remediation, GRC controls, scanning pipelines.

Required Skills:

• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, Rancher, GitOps, Linux, and cloud networking.
• Understanding of API gateway and WAF patterns.
• Experience with distributed systems and event driven architectures.
• Strong automation/Scripting (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, .NET).
• IaC:

o Terraform for foundational/bootstrap cluster provisioning.

o Crossplane as an orchestration layer (leveraging Terraform providers).

• Ability to work securely within PCI DSS/GDPR patterns.
• CI/CD: Concourse, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps.
• Observability: Grafana, Prometheus, Jaeger/Tempo, CloudWatch, Loki, OpenTelemetry.

Nice to Have:

• AWS operational experience.
• Service mesh (Istio/Kuma).
• Hybrid cloud experience (AWS + Azure + on prem).
• Payments or regulated industry background.

If you are interested in this role or wish to apply, please feel free to submit your CV.