Site Reliability Engineer Lead

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Lead – Observability Rate: £450-£475 per day (Inside IR35) Location: London (Hybrid, 2 days on site per week) Contract Role Overview: Join a high-impact team where you'll lead and shape the SRE and Observability function for a major transformation programme. This role goes beyond traditional SRE – you’ll champion best practices across product teams, drive observability strategy, and work hands-on with cutting-edge tools like Datadog and AWS. Key Responsibilities: Lead the SRE function and promote observability-first thinking across development and operations teams. Define and implement the observability roadmap across product domains in collaboration with the client. Be hands-on with Datadog for infrastructure and application-level monitoring. Guide and review daily operations and improvements across observability platforms. Partner with engineering squads to deliver on observability requirements in an agile, demand-led way. Core Skills & Experience: Proven experience as a hands-on SRE Engineer. Deep understanding of observability and monitoring practices. Practical experience with Datadog (or similar observability platforms). Strong DevOps toolchain knowledge: GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CodeQL, Nexus, CloudFormation, Terraform. Solid cloud engineering skills, especially with AWS (EC2, ELB, ECS, S3, CloudTrail, Config, Lambda, VPC, EFS). Desirable Skills: Exposure to container-based platforms (e.g., Docker). Experience with configuration management tools like Chef. AWS certification (or willingness to pursue one).