Head of Application Operations & Site Reliability Engineering

Ready to strengthen UK customers’ digital journeys through resilient technology operations?

Why HSBC

HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world. Guided by our purpose of opening up a world of opportunity, our ambition is to become the world’s most trusted bank globally, putting customers at the heart of everything we do.

The Role

As Head of Technology Operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) you’ll set the operating model for how UK Technology runs, recovers and continuously improves critical services. This role brings together service management, SRE, production support, operational resilience and risk and controls governance into a consistent approach across UK Tech value streams. The focus is on protecting and improving the everyday experience of UK customers and colleagues through stronger stability, recovery and reliability across technology services and digital journeys. Success looks like clearer accountability and decision rights, earlier visibility of service impact and measurably faster recovery when incidents occur. You’ll shape standards and shared tooling while keeping ownership close to product and engineering teams within strengthened guardrails. The remit spans the UK and India with a function of c. 20 FTE direct and 80 FTE indirect.

What you'll be doing

• Integrate UK Tech Operations and SRE into a consistent operating model across value streams and services
• Protect customer and colleague experience by strengthening recovery, resilience, stability and reliability across services and journeys
• Establish standardised service management and production support frameworks including incident, problem, change and IT service ownership practices
• Own SRE governance by defining principles, accountability, responsibility and decision rights across UK Tech services
• Set availability, stability and reliability outcomes including SLIs/SLOs, reliability targets and continuous service improvement
• Embed observability-led operations through monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, dashboards and actionable runbooks across critical services
• Improve incident prevention and recovery through better alerting, runbook automation, expedited L2/L3 escalation and reduced MTTR and disruptive minutes
• Govern operational resilience activity including IBS/TBSL governance, TRCB engagement, disaster recovery, mass recovery and resilience testing
• Strengthen risk and control outcomes via transparent metrics, threshold monitoring, escalation and a single auditable source of UK Tech reporting
• Deliver automation, AI and tooling improvements to reduce toil, remove duplication and increase ITSO capacity

What we're looking for

• Bring deep expertise across IT service management, production support, SRE, DevSecOps and incident, problem and change disciplines
• Demonstrate substantial experience shaping service resilience and reliability outcomes including MTTR reduction and service stability improvement
• Apply strong SRE practices including SLIs, SLOs, reliability targets, actionable alerting and runbook design
• Use observability tooling and practices including monitoring, logging, tracing, dashboards and customer journey visibility
• Show engineering experience that embeds build-time resilience, testing and automated deployment practices such as standard pipelines, canary deployment and test automation frameworks
• Navigate security and cyber risk considerations and engineering mitigations such as DAST/SAST testing models and layered defence approaches
• Deliver complex resilience activities including disaster recovery, capacity planning, performance testing, application vaulting-backup and operational resilience scenario support
• Operate confidently within risk, control, governance and assurance disciplines including control metrics, tech risk boards, vulnerabilities and control threshold escalation
• Partner effectively across CIO, engineering, product, platform, security, risk, operational resilience and third-party communities
• Use data, automation and AI to reduce manual effort, improve reporting accuracy and create a transparent golden source for service performance

Building Reliability at Scale

This is a chance to shape how UK Technology runs day-to-day and how it recovers when it matters most. You’ll bring consistency to service management and SRE practices across value streams while improving visibility, accountability and control outcomes. The impact is tangible - fewer disruptive minutes, faster recovery and stronger confidence in the resilience of customer and IBS journeys. If you want to set the standards and governance that improve reliability across UK Tech services we’d like to hear from you.

Being open to different points of view is important for our business and the communities we serve. At HSBC, we’re dedicated to creating diverse and inclusive workplaces - no matter their gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic background or age. We are committed to removing barriers and ensuring careers at HSBC are inclusive and accessible for everyone to be at their best. We take pride in being a Disability Confident Leader and will offer an interview to people with disabilities, long term conditions or neurodivergent candidates who meet the minimum criteria for the role.

If you have a need that requires accommodations or changes during the recruitment process, please get in touch with our Recruitment Helpdesk via [email protected] .