Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Job Description

At OVO, we are on a mission to solve one of humanity's biggest challenges, the climate crisis. And we know it takes all of us to change the world. That's why we need diverse people from all abilities, gender identities, ethnicities, ages, sexual orientations, life experiences and backgrounds to join us.

Teamworking for the planet

Everything we do here spins around Plan Zero. So, naturally, the team you'll be joining plays a gigantic role in making that happen. Here's how:

Site Reliability Engineering is at the heart of OVO's customer-focused technology transformation, building and maintaining scalable, efficient, and reliable platforms for OVO's applications and services. The goal of Site Reliability Engineering is to enhance the reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency of OVO's systems, enabling teams to confidently deliver robust services in GCP. This focus on smart and efficient usage of cloud services also contributes to reducing CO2 usage, which is at the heart of OVO's Plan Zero.

This role in a nutshell

As a Site Reliability Engineer at OVO, you'll help ensure our systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient. You'll focus on maintaining high service availability, improving performance, and optimising how we monitor and respond to incidents. Your expertise in reliability engineering will support continuous improvement, proactively resolve issues before they impact users, and strengthen the overall resilience of our infrastructure.

Your key outcomes will be

• Developing, Refining, and Automating Monitoring Systems: Design, manage and enhance monitoring, alerting and observability systems - such as Datadog, Prometheus and Grafana - ensuring they deliver meaningful insights and effective alerting. You'll also automate repetitive monitoring tasks to improve efficiency.
• Managing SLOs/SLIs and Improving Incident Response: Define and track SLOs and SLIs for key services, contributing to better reliability insights. You'll also help refine incident response processes, support on-call operations, and improve tooling and communication during incidents.
• Incident Management and Post-Mortem Analysis: Play a key role in resolving complex production incidents, leading or supporting technical response efforts. Following incidents, you'll conduct blameless post-mortems to uncover root causes and drive lasting improvements.
• Cost Optimisation Implementation: Assess infrastructure usage and apply approved strategies to optimise cloud costs - balancing resource efficiency with performance and reliability.
• Capacity Planning, Performance Tuning & Resilience: Using monitoring and load testing data, you'll support capacity planning, recommend performance improvements and help implement resilience best practices across systems.
• Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: Work closely with engineering, QA, security and product teams to embed reliability practices, document key processes and mentor peers to support collective learning and growth.
• Design Review Input:Take part in design reviews, offering guidance on how to improve reliability, scalability and day-to-day operability within system architecture.
• Community of Practice: Actively contribute to your Community of Practice - leading discussions, sharing experiences, mentoring others and helping shape content and capability growth within your area of expertise.

You'll be a successful in this role if you...

• Have a Software Engineering Background: You have professional experience in programming languages such as Python, Typescript, Go, or Java, and you apply software best practices (CI/CD, unit testing, code reviews) to infrastructure.
• Experienced with the Cloud: You have hands-on experience navigating the complexities of public cloud ecosystems (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and understand the nuances of cloud-native networking and storage. You can demonstrate an understanding of how distributed systems may fail, and how to design for fault tolerance.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Expert: You have advanced experience with Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane to manage at-scale infrastructure.
• Data-Driven Mindset: You use metrics and logs to drive engineering decisions. You understand the foundations of SLOs and error budgets.
• Problem Solver: You enjoy complex debugging. You can dive into the Linux kernel or network stack to find the root cause of a performance bottleneck.
• Mentor & Advocate: You are passionate about teaching "The SRE Way" to engineers, helping them take ownership of their services' reliability.
• Efficiency and Cost Engineering Mindset: You treat capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimisation as software engineering challenges rather than administrative tasks. You naturally lean toward building "efficiency-as-code"

Let's talk about what's in it for you

We'll pay you between ??64,070 and ??84,569, depending on your specific skills and experience.

We keep our pay ranges broad on purpose to give us, and you, flexibility to match your experience to our zero carbon mission.

You'll be eligible for an on-target bonus of 15%. We have one OVO bonus plan that focuses on the collective performance of our people to deliver our Plan Zero goal.

We also offer plenty of green benefits and progressive policies to help you feel like you belong at OVO...and there's flex pay. We'll give you 9% Flex Pay on top of your salary - 4% of this is auto enrolled into your pension, and the remaining 5% is yours to do what you like with. You can use this to buy from our extensive range of flexible benefits, including our green benefits which we've put at the heart of our offering, add to your pension or even take it as cash.

Here's a taster of what's on offer:

For starters, you'll get 34 days of holiday (including bank holidays).

For your health
With benefits like a healthcare cash plan or private medical insurance depending on your career level, critical illness cover, life assurance, health assessments, and more

For your wellbeing
With gym membership, travel insurance, workplace ISA, will writing services, dental insurance, and more

For your lifestyle
With extra holiday buying, discount dining, home & tech loans, and supporting your favourite charities with give-as-you-earn donations

For your home
Get up to ??400 towards any OVO Energy plan, plus great discounts on solar, smart thermostats and EV chargers

For your commute
Nab a great deal on ultra-low emission car leasing, plus our cycle to work scheme and public transport season ticket loans

Want to hear about our full range of flexible benefits and progressive people policies? Our People Team can tell you everything you need to know.

For your Belonging

To find better ways to support our people, we need to listen to each other's experiences and find ways to build a truly inclusive and diverse workplace. As part of this, we have 8 Belonging Networks at OVO. Led by our people, for our people - so when you join OVO, you can play a part - big or small - with any of the Networks. It's up to you.

Oh, and one last thing...

We'd be thrilled if you tick off all our boxes, yet we also believe it's just as important we tick off all of yours. And if you think you have most of what we're looking for but not every single thing, go ahead and hit apply. We'd still love to hear from you!

If you have any additional requirements, there's a space to let us know on the application form; we want to make the process as easy and comfortable for you as possible.