Software Engineer Lead - Site Reliability

This role is focused on making immediate, practical improvements across the Customer Digital Platform. You'll strengthen our DevOps foundations across Azure API platform integration, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD automation, observability, deployment safety and operational readiness, working closely with internal squads, strategic partners and third parties., As a Lead DevOps Engineer, you will be a hands-on contributor and technical lead focused on improving the engineering foundations of the Customer Digital Platform.

You will work across internal squads and with strategic partners, third parties, service, architecture and security teams to improve Azure API platform change, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, deployment safety, release readiness, monitoring, alerting and recovery capability., Deliver immediate DevOps improvements across the Customer Digital Platform, with a focus on practical engineering outcomes.

Improve Azure API platform integration, cloud infrastructure, environment support and route-to-live activity. Strengthen CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, GitHub/GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Terraform and automated testing. Improve deployment safety, release readiness and operational readiness for customer-facing digital services. Apply SRE principles pragmatically to improve availability, recoverability, monitoring and incident learning.

Strengthen monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting and service-health dashboards across digitally connected workloads. Reduce single points of failure and improve failover, degradation handling and recovery testing. Embed reliability, security, performance and operational-readiness expectations into engineering delivery. Support major incidents, post-incident reviews and root-cause analysis, ensuring improvement actions are owned and delivered.

Use DORA, availability, recovery and operational metrics to identify risks and evidence progress. Enable practical AI adoption across the SDLC, including developer tooling, code quality, testing, documentation and delivery-flow improvements. Work with strategic partners, third parties and other suppliers to improve DevOps capability, technical escalation, service improvement and knowledge transfer.

Coach engineers in modern engineering practices, automation and AI-enabled delivery where it improves quality and throughput. Significant experience as a DevOps Lead, Senior DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer or hands-on technical lead. A proactive, self-starting approach with evidence of identifying issues, shaping solutions and delivering improvements without heavy direction. Strong practical Azure experience, including Azure DevOps, Azure API Management or comparable API platform capabilities.

Hands-on expertise in Terraform, GitHub, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipeline design, deployment automation and release support. Practical knowledge of incident management, problem management, root-cause analysis and operational readiness. Good awareness of Site Reliability Engineering principles, with the ability to apply them pragmatically to DevOps and platform improvement work. Experience improving observability through monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, service-health dashboards and actionable telemetry.

Experience improving resilience through failover, graceful degradation, recovery testing and practical reliability improvements. Understanding of deployment safety, release automation, progressive delivery, performance and reliability engineering techniques. Experience using or shaping AI-enabled engineering practices across the SDLC, such as AI-assisted coding, automated testing, code review, documentation and developer productivity improvements.

If you're a proactive, self-starting engineer who enjoys getting things done and improving the reliability of live digital services, Standard Life could be the place for you. We're looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer to join our Digital Engineering team., We're Standard Life, a retirement specialis