Distinguished Engineer – Head of Service Reliability Engineering

Overview

In this role, you will lead enterprise-scale reliability engineering to shape the SRE strategy across HMRC’s digital estate. You will set reliability standards, drive observability maturation, and enable teams to operate with confidence in a complex, regulated environment. You will work with cross-government and industry partners to raise service maturity and ensure secure, resilient delivery. This executive position offers a unique chance to influence how HMRC builds trustworthy, resilient services at scale.

Responsibilities

• Define and steer Enterprise Reliability Strategy and Standards
• Own the Service Maturity Model and its application
• Oversee Observability and Evidence-Based Assurance initiatives
• Coach, enable, and uplift capability across teams
• Provide Independent Insight and Challenge to leadership
• Engage with Cross Government and Industry partners
• Executive Stakeholder Management and clear risk communication

Key requirements

• Senior technical leadership in enterprise-scale Reliability Engineering
• Experience leading SRE adoption with SLOs, error budgets, and reliability metrics
• Proven ability to govern observability capabilities (telemetry, mapping, monitoring platforms)
• Design and embed resilience and recovery practices with evidence-based improvements
• Secure-by-Design operational mindset and collaboration with cyber teams
• Cloud-native and platform engineering expertise in risk assessment and mitigation
• Develop and apply service maturity and assurance frameworks based on evidence

• Executive communication
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Mentoring and coaching
• SRE practices (SLOs, error budgets)
• Observability and telemetry
• Dependency mapping

…