Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Board Intelligence is a technology and advisory firm that supercharges boards with the science of board effectiveness. We build better businesses and benefit society.  

Through a suite of AI-powered software tools, evaluation frameworks, and advisory services that distil twenty years of boardroom experience, we improve the efficiency of board processes and the effectiveness of boards.  

We work with over 70,000 leaders and 3,000 organisations across the world, with clients across the Fortune 500, FTSE 100, and OMX 30. In 2024 we received substantial backing from K1 Investment Management – the leading B2B Enterprise SaaS investors. We are at the beginning of significant growth, and we’re looking for superb talent to join us on this journey.  

As we grow, we’re fiercely protective of our culture and values. Many of us, including our founders, have families and other priorities, so we know the value of a supportive company.  

The team is diverse and friendly. We value fun: most days you’ll find a social event or learning opportunity to get involved with, including company socials, away days, philanthropic activities and lunch & learns.

Our Mission

We unleash the potential of organisations through the science of board effectiveness, building better businesses and benefiting society. 

The Opportunity 

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you'll be joining a team whose mission is to ensure the availability, performance, security and reliability of our platform and core services, ensuring that they meet the needs of our internal and external users. You will take the lead on projects across the entire breadth of our tech stack, from planning all the way through to delivery and maintenance - you will bring others on the team with you on the journey too and not just go it alone. You will be responsible for visibility and monitoring of those systems, for building tooling and automation to reduce TOIL and for responding to incidents as part of our 24/7 SRE on-call team.

The SRE team:

• Strives to provide the highest standards of Availability, Scalability, Performance and Security for our Software as a Service environments across multiple cloud vendors and our own private cloud physical infrastructure hosted at datacentres in the UK.
• Provides enabling infrastructure, pipelines and tooling to support product development.
• Works closely with security, product development and commercial teams to ensure the future suitability of our infrastructure
• Agrees and sets standards and methodologies for engineering work
• Proactively monitors our platform and responds to incidents as part of a 24 / 7 rota

Key responsibilities of the role

We're looking for a great Senior SRE to be a hands on individual contributor to key technical projects and to help us build a first-class SRE function. This role will involve:

• Hands on work with technical projects, taking direction from the team Principals
• Implement and maintain monitoring solutions / metric-driven alerting, logging and tracing
• Troubleshoot in complex environments
• Establish and measure SLIs and SLOs with engineering teams and continuously improve relationships and ways of working with other engineering teams
• Participate in periodic 24x7 paid on-call duties
• Holds, or is eligible to obtain HMG Security Clearance at the SC level
• Build and manage systems, infrastructure and applications using infrastructure as code and automation (Terraform, Ansible, K8s, Helm, Go)
• Pair programming, knowledge sharing and running appropriate training sessions for the team
• Writing well-defined tickets (and supporting documentation when required) as well as keeping them up-to-date

What experience and skills you have

We prefer to work with the best talent regardless of whether you are familiar with all of the tools that we use. We don’t need you to be familiar with everything on this list but experience in some or all of these areas will be useful and a willingness to dive in and learn the others, essential.

• Security Clearance (SC) in the UK
• A strong background in SRE/DevOps or Linux System Administration
• A strong background in system automation using configuration management systems such as Ansible, Chef or Puppet.
• A solid understanding of containerisation and container orchestration using tools such as Kubernetes
• Experience with creation of automation using APIs
• Experience of automation testing in an Agile Software environment
• Close familiarity with some or all of:
• Network management and optimisation
• Postgresql Database management and optimisation
• With common security frameworks CIS, NIST, OWASP
• Familiarity with Public Cloud Services like AWS | GCP | Azure
• Familiarity with co-located physical infrastructure (we’re currently hybrid)
• Solid understanding of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD)
• Close familiarity with or direct experience of the trade-offs and design decisions Software Engineers need to make when developing applications that must perform and scale well in the real world
• Experience with technical writing and or reviewing technical designs
• Strong experience and understanding of Agile practices including Scrum, Kanban etc
• An understanding of one or more of the following languages: Ruby, Java, Go, Bash/Shell
• Strong experience with issue tracking software like Jira and story management lifecycle in general

Traits

• Strong communication skills with the ability and openness to work across a range of varied stakeholders and confidence to check and challenge when required.
• Cares about evolving SRE best practices (through a security lens) and is driven to find the right ways of working with the team
• Appreciation of architecture decisions and trade offs
• Is self-driven and constantly striving to improve everything with automation and monitoring
• Is able and willing to travel to our physical datacenters in the U.K should the need arise
• Demonstrates and promotes positive attitudes and behaviours: collaboration, learning, sharing, respect and kindness

Tech Stack 

Our applications are written in Ruby (with Rails) or Java. Client-side web apps are written in React, and some services in Clojure, Java and Go.

Our platform consists of:

• Multiple Kubernetes Cluster for Container orchestration
• Apache Kafka and Redis shortly Postgres for event messaging
• Postgres for data storage
• OpenStack Swift for Object storage
• Juniper & Cisco networking devices
• A number of internally written tools for managing the platform written in Go

We run our own physical infrastructure co-located in three datacentres across the UK. We also run a public cloud Production Environment on GCP for one of our products and we’re moving in the direction of more public cloud for production and pre-production environments and pipelines.

You do not need experience with all of that but a willingness to embrace and learn the bits that are new to you using knowledge and training tools available to you such as (Secureflag)

• Competitive salary & pension scheme
• Personal performance bonus
• 26 days holiday each calendar year
• Bupa health & dental cover
• Group life insurance
• EAP; AIG Smart Health and Bereavement Counselling & Probate Helpline
• Regular training & development, mini MBA series, lunch & learns
• Cycle to work scheme
• Competitive parental policies
• Gym membership discounts
• Monthly company socials