Description
This is a senior enterprise reliability leadership role operating across globally distributed, business-critical Network and Connectivity services.
The post holder is accountable for setting technical direction, resolving systemic and ambiguous reliability risks, and influencing prioritisation across multiple platform teams, suppliers and geographies without relying on direct line authority.
The role manages a portfolio of interdependent services with material operational, regulatory, cyber, resilience and financial consequences.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and monitor SLOs for the platforms served, and instrument those platforms for observability so reliability is measured rather than assumed.
- Apply AI and automation for anomaly detection, predictive alerting and self-healing, so that recurring conditions are handled without human intervention.
- Lead incident response for the platforms served, and drive root-cause resolution through to permanent prevention rather than closing on restoration.
- Improve resilience through capacity, failover and recovery engineering, and test recovery rather than documenting it.
- Reduce operational toil through automation and reusable tooling, working the identified manual task and toil candidates and evidencing the effort removed.
- Close observability coverage gaps for the platforms served, prioritising by the reliability risk each gap leaves unmeasured.
- Coach platform engineering teams in reliability practice and error-budget discipline, so reliability is built in rather than inspected in.
- Track reliability metrics against SLOs and team OKRs, and act on the trend rather than only reporting it.
- Support reliability oversight of supplier-run services, holding partner-operated components to the same SLOs as internal ones.
- Hold the central reliability standard while deployed in a platform domain, escalating to the Reliability Engineering Senior Director where local pressure would erode it.
- Feed reliability evidence into the platform backlog held by the Product Owner, so that resilience work competes on stated risk rather than on goodwill.
- Hold the boundaries with the Principal Engineers on platform build, the Major Incident Manager on the major incident process, and the Platform Manager on the reliability targets the platform commits to.
- Set the multi-year reliability strategy and engineering roadmap for the assigned Network and Connectivity portfolio, translating enterprise risk and business priorities into funded reliability outcomes.
- Own cross-platform reliability governance, including service tiering, SLO policy, error-budget decisions, resilience exceptions and common engineering standards across internal and supplier-operated services.
- Lead resolution of complex, high-impact and systemic failure modes spanning cloud, hosting, network, security, applications and third-party dependencies, with authority to convene senior technical and service leaders.
- Provide evidence-based recommendations for investment, risk acceptance and supplier performance decisions, including prioritisation across a material service portfolio and, where delegated, spend of up to approximately GBP 25 million.
- Represent Reliability Engineering in Director, Senior Director and VP-level governance, communicating service risk, business impact, trade-offs and required decisions in clear executive terms.
- Mentor Principal and Senior Engineers, build communities of practice and raise engineering capability across regions rather than delivering only through individual contribution.
Professional Qualifications
- Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering).
- Reliability or platform certifications desirable (e.g., a recognised cloud certification, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, or ITIL 4 for incident and problem practice).
Area of Specialisation
- Site reliability engineering, covering SLOs, observability instrumentation, error budgets and toil reduction.
- AIOps and operations automation, covering anomaly detection, predictive alerting and self-healing.
Job-Related Experience
- Overall 15 years and 10+ years in Network engineering or operations, including at least two years in a hands-on site reliability or platform reliability role.
- 5+ years supporting large-scale production network environments.
- Demonstrated experience operating global LAN/WAN/Wi-Fi/Network Services.
- Practical experience managing incidents, problems, changes, and service reliability improvements.
- Proven experience defining and measuring network SLIs, SLOs, and operational KPIs.
- Demonstrated accountability for globally distributed, 24x7, business-critical services and for decisions with material operational, regulatory, customer or financial impact.
- Proven ability to influence Directors, Senior Directors and VP-level stakeholders, including presenting options, quantified risk, trade-offs and investment recommendations.
- Experience governing strategic suppliers and complex service ecosystems, with exposure to substantial technology budgets or portfolios; direct budget ownership is desirable but not mandatory where strong investment influence is evidenced.
- Track record of setting technical direction, leading through ambiguity and developing senior engineering capability across organisational and geographic boundaries.
Technical Knowledge
- Strong knowledge of: Routing and Switching, TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, DNS, DHCP, IPAM, Network Segmentation and NAC, Network Monitoring Platforms
- Experience with: Network automation, APIs, Python scripting, Infrastructure as Code ,CI/CD principles, Telemetry and observability platforms.
Reliability & Operations
- Experience improving: Availability, MTTR, Change Success Rate, Service Performance
- Experience performing: RCA investigations, Blameless postmortems, Capacity planning , Resilience testing, Operational governance