Site Reliability Engineer Technical Lead

Location: Remote

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

About us

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. 

We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day. 

Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 7,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days. 

At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn. 

About the role

We are looking for an experienced and collaborative Site Reliability Technical Lead to join our Site Reliability team and take ownership of system and solution design to ensure our products are robust, scalable, and secure. The remit and focus of the role is to blend deep technical expertise with leadership, requiring you to mentor and coach engineers, embed a culture of quality and reliability, and guide the team in making sound technical decisions. It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge - if you’re highly technical and a good communicator, this is the role for you.

Core responsibilities

• Architectural Leadership: Define and guide system architecture, balancing trade-offs between speed, scalability, maintainability, and security to meet business goals.
• Reliability and Performance: Champion accountability from design through to production by ensuring systems are observable and meet agreed Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Drive continuous improvement in platform reliability, performance, and efficiency.
• Incident Management: Lead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) when issues occur and contribute to optimizing the incident response process and framework.
• Automation: Drive automation initiatives across the team to reduce operational toil and improve system efficiency.
• Technical Standards: Uphold coding standards, promote automated testing, and work with the architecture community to drive technology adoption and share best practices across teams. Ensure production readiness standards for all services.
• Planning and Delivery: Lead technical estimation and feasibility assessments, ensuring plans are realistic and aligned with team capacity. Contribute to structured release planning and support post-release reviews.
• Mentorship and Coaching: Mentor and coach engineers through constructive feedback, knowledge sharing, and motivation. Foster alignment and help the team galvanise around technical solutions and goals.
• Collaboration: Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and other engineers to align technical direction with product strategy. Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

About you

• Experience: Extensive professional experience in SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering on complex, scalable systems.
• Cloud Systems: Extensive expertise with AWS and distributed cloud architectures.
• Platform Scale: Proven experience operating platforms serving a high volume of requests (~1000 req/sec).
• Infrastructure as Code: Advanced proficiency with Terraform and configuration management tools.
• Programming: Strong skills in Python, Go, or a similar language for automation and tooling.
• Observability: Deep experience with monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., DataDog, Prometheus, or equivalent), plus incident/problem management.
• System Design: Expert understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and resilience patterns.
• Containerisation: Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS).
• CI/CD: Practical experience with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments.
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability in mentoring and supporting the growth of fellow engineers.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with chaos engineering and reliability testing.
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance frameworks.
• Background in agile and lean methodologies (Scrum/Kanban).
• Contributions to open-source projects or the SRE community.

What we offer

The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you’ll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks 
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa 
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching) 
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
• Dog friendly offices!

Interview process

1. Phone screen
2. 1st stage
3. 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at [email protected].

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice. 

Arbor Education is an equal opportunities organisation

Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively  encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. 

Refer a friend 

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: [email protected] 

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.