Site Reliability Engineering Manager

Site Reliability Engineering Manager
Location: Stone, Staffordshire Hybrid working, 2 days a week in our Stone Office)
Status: Permanent
Package: Competitive Salary, Flexible Working, Development & Opportunity (Personal & Technical), Private Medical (Optical & Dental options), Matching Contributory Pension, 25 Days Leave + Public Holidays + Buy and Sell Scheme, Life Insurance, Referral Scheme, Employee Assistance Program, Benefits Hub.

At Instem, you’ll empower pharmaceutical companies, CROs, government agencies, academic institutions, by providing cutting-edge SaaS solutions and consultancy services designed to help researchers make discoveries, and to accelerate and advance their research programs.

You’ll work with technology that supports over 50% of global drug discovery and is trusted by leading pharmaceutical, biotech and CRO organisations worldwide.

As a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager, you will lead the strategic direction and execution of reliability engineering across our SaaS platforms hosted on Rackspace and Azure, leading the transition from Rackspace to Azure and ensuring reliability is built into our new cloud-native applications from the outset. You will be responsible for scaling SRE practices, driving platform resilience, and embedding operational excellence into the software delivery lifecycle. This role requires a strategic leader who can influence executive and cross-functional stakeholders, mentor SRE team members, stay hands-on to drive change, and ensure our platforms meet the highest standards of reliability, performance, and compliance.

Our Culture & Work Environment.

You’ll be part of a friendly, solutions-focused environment within a global business of over 400 people. Here, you’ll experience a high-performance culture balanced with genuine flexibility - we trust you to take ownership, deliver meaningful results, and work in a way that suits you.

You’ll be encouraged to grow, share your ideas, and make a real impact. We’re passionate about creating a place where you can develop your skills, contribute confidently, and succeed in your career.

Why join us as a Site Reliability Engineering Manager?

You will collaborate with engineering, operations, and business strategy to own the reliability roadmap, championing automation and the responsible use of AI, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and service ownership. This is a leadership role with a hands-on element: you will lead by example, working alongside the team to deliver improvements. You will report to the VP of Platform Engineering, a one of a kind role here at Instem! 

What You’ll Be Doing

Strategic Leadership
• Define and evolve the SRE vision, strategy, and roadmap in alignment with business goals and customer commitments.
• Influence engineering and product leadership to adopt reliability-first principles and to secure investment in the reliability roadmap.
• Act as the senior voice of SRE in executive forums, audits, and strategic planning, reporting on platform risk, resilience, and performance.

Team & Capability Development
• Lead and scale a high-performing global SRE organisation, mentoring and coaching SRE team members at every level, from engineers to managers.
• Provide hands-on technical coaching through pairing, code and design reviews, and incident shadowing to build skills and confidence across the team.
• Foster a culture of accountability, innovation, and psychological safety.
• Drive hiring, succession planning, and career development initiatives.

Operational Excellence
• Govern platform-wide SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to guide engineering priorities.
• Oversee incident management strategy, including response, communication, and post-incident reviews.
• Lead initiatives to eliminate toil through automation and AI, improve MTTR, and enhance observability.
• Participate in the on-call rota and act as the senior escalation point during major incidents.

Technical Oversight
• Guide architectural decisions related to reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Ensure consistent adoption of CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and automation best practices.
• Drive the evolution of telemetry, monitoring, and alerting systems.
• Remain hands-on, contributing directly to code, automation, and Infrastructure as Code to prototype solutions, unblock the team, and drive change across the platform.

Cloud Transition & Cloud-Native Platforms
• Lead the reliability workstream for the transition of our SaaS platforms from Rackspace to Azure, ensuring migrations are planned, resilient, and delivered with minimal customer impact, including cutover readiness, rollback, and disaster recovery.
• Embed SRE practices into the design and build of new cloud-native applications in Azure, including SLOs, observability, resilience patterns, and production-readiness reviews from the outset.
• Establish operating standards and reference patterns for Azure workloads, covering security, cost optimisation, and resilience, and support the safe decommissioning of Rackspace services.

AI & Intelligent Automation
• Define and lead the strategy for applying AI and large language model tools (e.g., Claude, OpenAI Codex) to automate and accelerate the SRE lifecycle, including incident triage, diagnostics, runbook execution, change management, and post-incident reviews.
• Establish standards and guardrails for AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows, covering security, data privacy, quality, and human oversight, in line with the Company’s Quality Management System.
• Champion AI-assisted coding and automation across the SRE team, evaluating and piloting new tooling and measuring its impact on toil, MTTR, and delivery speed.

Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Partner with security, compliance, and architecture teams to ensure platform integrity.
• Align with product and engineering teams to balance feature velocity with operational stability.
• Lead SRE contributions to compliance audits, risk assessments, and quality reviews.
• Ensure adherence to the Company’s Quality Management System in all delivery activities.

What We’re Looking For

• Proven leadership of SRE, platform engineering, or infrastructure teams at a senior level.
• Proven track record of mentoring and developing engineers while remaining hands-on to drive technical change.
• Extensive experience managing hybrid cloud environments, with deep Azure expertise and experience leading migrations from hosted platforms (e.g., Rackspace) to Azure.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native applications in Azure (e.g., containers, microservices, and managed PaaS services) with reliability engineered in from the start.
• Deep expertise in observability platforms (e.g., Datadog), telemetry pipelines, and incident tooling.
• Strong background in CI/CD, automation, and Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Advanced scripting or software engineering proficiency.
• Hands-on experience applying AI and large language model tools (e.g., Claude, OpenAI Codex) to automate SRE and operational workflows such as incident triage, runbooks, and reporting.
• Understanding of the risks and controls required when using AI in regulated environments, including data privacy, security, and human-in-the-loop oversight.
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale incident response and reliability programmes.
• Working knowledge of ITSM platforms (e.g., Ivanti) and of operating in regulated environments.
• Excellent communication skills with experience influencing senior stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of Quality Management Systems in service operations

Ready to Make a Difference?

Join a team that values your perspective and supports your growth, while helping shape the future of life sciences. Apply now - we’d love to hear from you, and our Talent team will be in touch.

An Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

Instem stores and processes data using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). For more information regarding our privacy policy use the following link: https://www.instem.com/privacy/
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