Head of SRE - Bristol

You will act as the founding SRE leader, setting the vision, operating model, and priorities for the function, while driving improvements in service stability, resilience, observability, and overall operational maturity. Lead the organisation’s shift from reactive firefighting to data‑driven, preventative reliability practices, and influence platform and application design so that reliability is engineered in from the outset rather than addressed after issues arise.

Define and embed a scalable SRE operating model aligned to organisational culture and maturity, with clear roles, responsibilities, and ways of working across SRE, platform, infrastructure, and application teams.

Build and grow the SRE capability, shaping team structures, backlog priorities, and operating rhythms to improve reliability across both legacy environments and a modern, automated target platform.

Establish meaningful service reliability measurement, implementing Critical User Journeys, SLIs, and SLOs to create baselines and provide end‑to‑end service health visibility.

Embed SLO‑driven decision making, enabling balanced, data‑led trade‑offs between availability, delivery velocity, and operational risk.

Reduce operational toil and increase resilience through automation initiatives, including runbook automation, self‑healing approaches, and improved deployment, patching, as well as recovery strategies.

Strengthen incident and problem management, enhancing major incident response, coordination, and communication, and driving high‑quality root cause analysis to prevent recurrence.

Define and implement pragmatic observability standards across logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and dashboards to reduce noise and improve signal quality.

Lead stakeholder engagement and organisational change, influencing senior leaders to adopt SRE principles and acting as a trusted authority on reliability and operational excellence.

Significant hands‑on experience in Site Reliability Engineering or reliability‑focused production engineering roles.

Proven success establishing SRE practices in a large, complex enterprise environment.

Experience working in environments with legacy platforms on‑prem or private cloud infrastructure

High operational and regulatory expectations.

Strong engineering background with a practical approach to automation and problem solving.

Deep understanding of incident management, problem management and operational resilience.

Ability to design simple, scalable operating models

Calm, confident leadership during high‑pressure production incidents with clear, credible communication at senior stakeholder level

Pragmatic, outcome‑focused engineering mindset

Foundational leadership in ambiguous, evolving environments

Experience building SRE capability where maturity was low or undefined.

Exposure to large‑scale technology transformation programmes.

Experience standardising observability across fragmented toolsets.

Familiarity with global, multi‑application environments supporting critical business services.

Experience mentoring teams or building communities of practice around reliability.

Career coaching, mentoring and access to upskilling throughout your entire FDM career

Initial upskilling pre-assignment that has been accredited by TechSkills

Assignments with global companies and opportunities to work abroad

Opportunity to obtain certifications from Microsoft, Salesforce, Cisco and more

FDM is an award-winning global leader in tech and business talent solutions, backed by more than 35 years of industry experience. We have centres across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific, and a global workforce of over 2500 employees. FDM has shown exponential growth throughout the years, firmly establishing itself as an award-winning employer, currently listed on the FTSE4Good Index and as a 2026 Financial Times UK ‘Best Employer’.

FDM Group is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other status protected by federal, provincial or local laws.

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