Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Python

Contract Type: Permanent

Salary: London £67,547 to £83,778, National £63,824 to £80,158. Salary is dependent on location and technical skills as assessed at interview.

Closing date: 27th July 2026 at 12pm (noon)

Number of open roles: 1

Location: London, Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Salford, Edinburgh

Grade: Grade 7

Join a team at the heart of the global economy! The Department for Business and Trade (“DBT”) and Inspire People are partnering together to bring you an exciting opportunity for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (with either strong Python skills or

other language backgrounds who can demonstrate the ability to learn Python quickly), to join a team that ensures DBT’s digital services work as users expect, working with development teams giving them the tools for their job, including application performance monitoring, exception, log and metrics aggregation, dashboards, and declarative CD/CI pipelines. £63,824 to £83,778 (including allowances) plus excellent Civil Service benefits and pension. Salary is dependent on location and technical skills as assessed at interview. Flexible, hybrid working from London, Cardiff, Darlington. Birmingham, Salford, Edinburgh or Belfast. .

About DBT

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission – to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways.

Firstly, we help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.

Secondly, we open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains. This can be through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.

Finally, we work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advance, finance and deal-making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (DevOps), you will play a key role in designing, building and running reliable, scalable and secure platform services that underpin critical DBT digital products. Working in multidisciplinary, agile teams, you’ll help ensure development teams have the tools and support they need, from observability and monitoring through to CI/CD pipelines so services are resilient, performant and centred around user needs. You’ll champion good engineering practices, helping teams use data and insight to continuously improve how services are delivered and operated.

This is a hands-on role where you’ll spend much of your time building and improving platform capabilities directly. You’ll work closely with product managers, architects and engineers to improve reliability and reduce operational burden, while also supporting and mentoring others across the engineering community. You’ll contribute to building and scaling our global platform, support live services through an on-call rota, and play an active role in initiatives such as enhancing observability and streamlining deployment processes to improve service quality and delivery outcomes.

Main responsibilities

You will:

Build and maintain shared service products enabling developers to be more efficient.
Write clean, maintainable and well-tested code to support platform and tooling development.
Work closely with development teams to provide and improve platform tooling, including monitoring, logging, metrics, dashboards and CI/CD pipelines.
Build, maintain and improve reliable, secure and scalable cloud-based infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code approaches.
Support teams to adopt SRE practices, including Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets.
Contribute to observability across services, helping teams better understand performance, reliability and user impact.
Develop and improve CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, frequent and low-risk delivery of changes.
Collaborate with product, delivery and architecture colleagues to ensure platform services meet user and business needs.
Support live service operations, including incident response, troubleshooting and problem management, with a focus on learning and continuous improvement.
Share knowledge and provide coaching and mentoring to colleagues, contributing to a supportive and inclusive engineering community.
Contribute to improving security, resilience and compliance practices within the platform.

What tech will you be using?

Python and Django framework
PostgreSQL as a service (Amazon RDS)
Redis/Elasticache
AWS and Azure
GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipelines/CodeBuild
Terraform
Docker, Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
ElasticSearch/OpenSearch
Datadog and Logstash

Essential Skills:

Experience writing clean, maintainable code in at least one programming language.
Experience designing, operating and improving distributed systems, with a focus on reliability, performance and user impact.
Experience of building applications hosted on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
Ability to build code-defined, reliable and well-tested infrastructure using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation or similar.
Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals and TCP/IP networking.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to build effective working relationships with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

How we interview

At the interview stage for this role, you will be asked to demonstrate relevant Technical Skills and Behaviours from the Success Profiles framework. A role-specific list of these can be found below.

The technical element within the interview, where you will be asked a series of questions to demonstrate your specific professional skills and knowledge related directly to the job role and context, will assess against capabilities which are outlined under DevOps engineer within the DDaT framework which can be found here. As part of this process, you will be asked to complete a technical problem-solving exercise during your interview. Further details will be provided following sift.

Technical Skills

Availability and capacity management
Development process optimisations
Information security
Modern standards approach
Programming and build (software engineering)
Prototyping (with MVP and POC)
Systems integration
User focus

Behaviours

Communicating and Influencing
Developing Self and Others

How we Offer
Offers will be made in merit order based on location preferences. If you pass the bar at interview but are not the highest scoring you will be held on a 12-month reserve list in case a role becomes available. If you are judged a near miss at interview, you may be offered a post at the grade below the one you applied for.

This role requires SC clearance. DBT’s requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years. Failure to meet this requirement will result in your application being rejected and your offer will be withdrawn.

Checks will also be made against:

departmental or company records (personnel files, staff reports, sick leave reports and security records)
UK criminal records covering both spent and unspent criminal records
your credit and financial history with a credit reference agency
security services record
location details

Benefits
If you join DBT, you will get:

learning and development tailored to your role
a flexible, hybrid working environment with options like condensed hours
a culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
a Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%
annual leave starting at 25 days rising to 30 days with service
three paid volunteering days a year
an employee benefits programme including cycle to work

More about DBT

This role can only be worked from within the UK, not overseas. If you are based in London, you will receive London weighting. DBT employees work in a hybrid pattern, spending 2-3 days a week (pro rata) in the office on average. Travel to your primary office location will not be paid for by DBT, but costs for travel to an office which is not your main location will be covered.

You can find out more about our office locations, how we calculate salaries, our diversity statement and reasonable adjustments, the Recruitment Principles, the Civil Service code and our complaints procedure on our website.

Find out more about life at DBT, our benefits and meet the team by watching our video or reading our blog!

If you are a DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer or Linux/Unix Systems Administrator looking to enhance your career and make a difference across an expanding function, then apply today or contact Keesha Paulsen at Inspire People in complete confidence for further information.

Apply now

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To apply you must meet the eligibility requirements to work in the UK Civil Service. You can apply if you are a UK, EU, EEA or Swiss national. You may be able to apply if you are a Commonwealth or Turkish national or a family member of an EU, EEA or Swiss national. Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

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This role requires SC clearance. DBT’s requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years. Failure to meet this requirement means we are unable to progress further with your application. Thank you for your interest in DBT.

This role requires you to meet the above nationality requirements to work in the UK Civil Service. Failure to meet this requirement means we are unable to progress further with your application. Thank you for your interest in the DBT

Guaranteed Interview Scheme (GIS)

You may be eligible to apply via the Guaranteed Interview Scheme (GIS) if you have a disability as defined by the Equality Act 2010. This means you must have:

– A physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long term (over 12 months) adverse effect on your ability to carry out normal day to day activities

– A long term health condition; and

– Demonstrated that you meet the minimum qualifying criteria set out in the job advertisement.

For more information please use this link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guaranteed-interview-scheme

Do you feel that you meet the criteria and would like to apply under the GIS scheme?*

Will you require a reasonable adjustment during the interview/assessment stages? For instance, you may require wheelchair access?*

If you require assistance during the selection stages, please provide further details

Veteran Interview Scheme (VIS)

You may be eligible to apply as of 1st April 2022 if:

– You are currently serving in the Armed Forces and are within 12 months of your discharge date

– The Armed Forces were your last long term substantive employer and no more than 3 years has elapsed since you left the Armed Forces.

– You meet the minimum qualifying criteria set out in the job advertisement.

Do you feel that you meet the requirements and would like to apply for the Veteran Interview Scheme?*

Redeployment Interview Scheme

You may be eligible to apply as of 1st April 2022 if you are an existing Civil Servant and if:

You are at risk of redeployment in your current role
You have already been made redundant and placed on a RRR list
You have demonstrated that you meet the minimum qualifying criteria set out in the job advertisement.

Do you feel that you meet the requirements and would like to apply for the RIS Scheme?*

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