Head of Site Reliability Engineering

Wagestream is on a mission to bring better financial wellbeing to all workers. We're a global leader in Earned Wage Access (EWA), partnering with renowned employers like Bupa, Asda, Burger King, and the NHS. Our financial wellbeing super-app empowers over three million people to choose how often they're paid, track earnings, save, budget, and access fair financial products.

VC-backed and growing at scale-up pace, Wagestream operates with a strong social conscience. Founded by leading financial charities and impact funds, our social charter mandates that every product must enhance financial health and reduce the £5.6bn 'premium' lower-income earners pay for financial services each year. We are a passionate team of over 200 across the UK and the USA, building a category-leading fintech product towards Neobank status.

The Opportunity:

Wagestream is hiring a hands-on Head of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to lead and grow our SRE team and drive the reliability, scalability, and performance of our production systems. This role is a hands-on role leading a small team, where we need the leader to act as a player-manager.

We believe that SRE consists of 4 key elements:

1. Incident Management & Response: Includes leading incident response, conducting blameless post-mortems, and implementing preventative measures to minimize downtime and learn from failures.

2. Observability & Monitoring: Includes implementing comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems to gain deep insights into system health, performance, and user experience.

3. Infrastructure Management: Managing Cloud services, covering areas such as cost and capacity management.

4. Automation & Toil Reduction: Includes identifying and automating repetitive, manual tasks to improve operational efficiency and allow engineers to focus on more valuable work.

You don't have to be great at all of these areas for us to want to talk to you. We want to help you grow and develop your skills in areas you are less familiar with over time.

The Team:

You will lead and manage our small team of Site Reliability Engineers and report directly to the CTO. You will collaborate closely with other department heads (e.g., Operations, Product, Engineering) to align SRE initiatives with overall business objectives.

What will you be doing?

Leadership & Management

• Drive all incidents to resolution and closure, ensuring all actions are always completed.
• Build and train a rotational team of Incident Commanders from across the Engineering function
• Build, mentor, and manage a small team of Site Reliability Engineers, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning.
• Set clear goals and performance expectations for the team, providing regular feedback and coaching.
• Identify, scope, and prioritise high-impact SRE projects that improve system reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency.
• Champion SRE principles and a culture of reliability throughout the organisation.
• Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies in site reliability, cloud infrastructure, and automation.

Technical Execution & Oversight

• Develop and implement a robust incident management framework, including on-call rotations and blameless post-mortems.
• Define and track Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to ensure system reliability and performance.
• Oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of our cloud infrastructure.
• Drive the automation of infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and software deployments.
• Collaborate with the Software Engineering team to ensure new services are designed with reliability, scalability, and performance in mind.
• Oversee the monitoring and observability of all production systems, ensuring proactive issue detection and resolution.
• Manage capacity planning and ensure our systems can handle future growth.

Our Tech Stack:

• Cloud: AWS
• Infrastructure as Code: AWS Python CDK
• Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, ECS
• Observability: Grafana
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Code: Python, Typescript
• Database: PostgreSQL, Snowflake

What experience might you have?

• Strong technical background, ideally grounded in a Computer Science, Engineering, or a related degree.
• Previous management experience leading a technical team.
• Previous professional experience in a Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Systems Engineering role.
• Previous professional experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
• Advanced skills in a scripting language such as Python.
• Deep understanding of automation, monitoring, and incident management best practices.
• Good communication skills, enthusiasm, humility, and a desire to learn.
• A preference to work in a fast-paced and unstructured environment.

What We’ll Do For You:

Salary: Dependent on experience with no upper bound + equity , commensurate with experience. (We anticipate this role to align with leadership compensation levels, starting from £100,000 and £125,000 per year.

Hybrid Working: Ability to work from our London office 3 days a week, blending with remote work.

Join a team that is fundamentally changing how people are paid. We offer a culture of trust and autonomy, where you can make a significant impact in a rapidly growing, mission-driven organisation. We provide competitive compensation (dependent on experience, with market-leading bonus incentives and stock options) and a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your wellbeing and professional growth.

Benefits:

• 25 Days Annual Leave in addition to public holidays (up to 5 day rollover), as well as flexible time off allowances for any ad-hoc childcare/family/caring needs
• 24 weeks' paid Maternity Leave and 4 weeks paid Paternity Leave for employees with over 12 months service
• Special Leave for In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments
• Sabbatical scheme
• Paid leave to volunteer
• Private Healthcare including comprehensive mental and physical healthcare
• Salary sacrifice to pension, as well as bonus exchange to Pension: reap even more rewards of any bonus by paying into your pension & save on Tax and NI + added compound growth
• Season Ticket Loan
• Access to Salary Sacrifice Schemes via ThanksBen: THE Benefits marketplace. Choose the benefits you want, when you want. Pay less tax, receive more value, including: Workplace nurseries, Cycle to Work, Home and Tech Scheme and more.
• The best benefit of all, access to Wagestream!

At Wagestream we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Wagestream is an equal opportunity workplace. We are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity/expression, or veteran status.